Film thot

[gyzki]

Have you ever watched a movie that had been filmed in a location you knew really well-your home town, say, or your college campus-and been struck hard by some sequence where they get the geography badly wrong? The classic case is a long walk (usually a conversation) that could never be walked in that sequence: going in very different directions,

Comments

[peregrinning]

The movie that caused this most for me was Just Visiting (2001), with Jean Reno and Christian Clavier. It was set in Chicago, and I had lived there for about three years, so recognizing museums, Lake Shore Drive, the L, etc. and how they were disconnected from reality made for interesting cartography. Someday I want to see the original version, as I hear it is much better. I found the movie entertaining and silly, but I would not recommend it for fear of the person I recommended it to would say they had heard of it from me...

[tamarinne]

Pretty much any time a movie is set in Chicago, I start sputtering whenever they're walking around outside. So much non-Euclidean geography....

[gryphon2k]

Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind, the MIT scenes (especially Good Will Hunting, where it would not have taken much research whatsoever to get so many more things correct).

I have occasionally seen shows or movies that were set around the environs in PA I grew up in, and NONE of them are ever right.

[gyzki]

it would not have taken much research whatsoever to get so many more things correct

That's just it: folks like you and me, we think of "getting it correct" as a good thing, and wouldn't it have been so easy for them to do? But they're not trying to get it correct, they're trying to achieve a certain look, and accurate geography isn't even a secondary consideration. (Or history, or the original book, we can go on and on...)

[hfcougar]

I know just enough about Boston that I'm only barely beginning to be disturbed by movies set there.

I remember in Fargo when they went to a bar in Brainerd that is actually on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis (and has a relatively conspicuous sign, not just a hole in the wall).

[cristovau]

The banquet of cinematography that was xXx was mostly in Prague, and they jumped all over the place. Ah well, I suppose I could forgive an action movie, but I had just come back from there.

[negothick]

So many films and TV shows are shot in Vancouver that when I visited the city for the first time, it looked vaguely familiar. The Gastown neighborhood is tiny, yet so many "period" establishing shots have been done there. Then there's that futuristic building that looks much taller than it is because the buildings around it are not tall. You've seen it blown up in a hundred cheesy SyFy invasion movies.