devil in the white city

So, as expected, I loved The Dark Knight like crazy. Of course I did. I seem to be functionally incapable of not being in love with Christian Bale's characters.

But the thing that I loved best about the film was the fact that they totally stopped pretending that Gotham isn't Chicago. The movie opened with a shot of Union Station - at one point, Bruce goes zipping through the new Millennium Street Station - the trains are clearly Chicago Metra and Amtrak lines - one of the major fight scenes takes place on La Salle street, right in front of the Board of Trade Building, and they didn't even edit out the street signs. There were big panning shots of the Adams/Jackson/Van Buren bridges over the river. The Boy and I kept making squeaky noises when we recognized landmarks or places we'd been. It was lovely to see my pretty city up there in the midst of all the other mythic wonderfulness.