Hollywood has long been a little suspicious of modern architecture. Its most dystopian visions of the future, from "2001" to "Gattaca" to "I, Robot," have always been as sleek and ornament-free as any building by Mies van der Rohe. And although movie heroes usually return home to the kind of domestic stability symbolized by picket fences and gabled roofs, the characters living in steel-and-glass boxes have tended to be evil, deviant or seriously repressed.
"Look at a movie like 'The Ice Storm,' " says Donald Albrecht, author of the two-volume study "Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies." "The architecture is cold because the characters are cold."
But a handful of new films suggests that Hollywood may be warming to Modernism -- or at least acknowledging a more complicated relationship with its landmarks and symbols. In Pixar's retro-futuristic animated film "The Incredibles" and the marionette satire "Team America: World Police," it's the good guys who live in the Modernist or Neo-Modernist digs. Live-action films like the remake of "Alfie," which is set in contemporary New York but marked by a skinny-tie aesthetic, have joined recent pictures including "Down with Love" and the "Austin Powers" series in sending cinematic valentines to the architects and designers of the 1960s.