So I'm sitting here watching "The Golden Compass" and a thought I've had before recurs: Why do cities in fantasy films look so wonderful when cities in real life (especially in the U.S.) look so pathetically dull?

I mean it's pretty obvious that we love the concept of these fantastic cities. Every time we create a city that doesn't have to be historically accurate there are spires, domes, minarets, arches, details cornices, even fantastic parks and statues. Half the fun of a fantasy film is seeing the wonder and beauty of the human imagination. My question is: why do we insist on being so incredibly dull in the real world?

We more or less have the ability to build most of the wonders envisioned, or at least a good number of them. In fact up until the death of the Art Deco movement we were pretty much moving in that direction. For much of history architects did try to create beauty and wonder. A building might be considered noteworthy in many ways: it might be the biggest of it's kind, the most beautiful, the most revolutionary, even the most unusual. Sadly it seems that some time around WWII we started playing it safe. Real estate was too expensive to take risks. We might still strive to be the biggest, maybe once in a while even revolutionary, but even the revolutionary rarely looked it.

DA is filled with photographers, painters, poets, digital visionaries, models, sculptors, and every other kind of artist there is. Imagine if cities had the same desire to seek beauty as the foks here. If cities were wonderous places where even the post office was a place of amazement, folks would be racing into them rather than fleeing them.

I want to live in Minas Tirith. How 'bout you?