I’m eager to see this adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 novel by the same name, but I’ve been hearing mainly negative reviews.  However, with respect to the image of the city in the film, a review that I read either in the Post-Gazette or The Tribune remarked that the city “has never looked better.”

Pittsburgh has so often beeen used in film as a run down town that the protagonist wants to get away from (see Flashdance, & Deerhunter).  In Chabon’s book though, we get a version of Pittsburgh that is far more complex — one that breaks outside the reductive image of it as an old steel town, or the rust belt’s Bedford Falls.