The film The Jackal was pretty terrible, but hey, I have a taste for ludicrous action movies. One thing that struck me, though, was the settings, which included Helsinki, Montreal, and rural Ontario. It occurred to me that your average screenwriter would have made them, oh, London, Paris, and maybe upstate New York.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to express – just that it’s an agreeable little startlement when a movie is set in a major city that you don’t see movies set in too often.
Speaking of ludicrous action movies, our beloved Starship Troopers started out in Buenos Aries.
Think it’s a bad action movie thing? Taking Lives was set in Montreal (which we could tell, because the establishing shots all showed Quebec City… rolleyes) and Moncton, New Brunswick (again, which we could tell from the Sûreté du Québec helicopter setting down in front of the Quebec City train station, which turned into Windsor Station in Montreal when they ran into it…)
Then again, you have those buttloads of disaster movies set in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, for no apparent reason.
Oh, yeah, and all the Québécois have French-from-France accents… it’s really quite hilarious.
The Boondock Saints was set in Boston (but filmed in Toronto)… I haven’t seen many movies set in Boston.
The movie Twentynine Palms was actually filmed in Twentynine Palms, CA.
Besides the Pyramids, the Kremlin, Big Ben, the Colloseum, and the Eiffel Tower, those cities are pretty much the only ones with monuments that the average Bruckheimer fan is going to recognize and watching the White House and the Statue of Liberty blow up is k3wl.
Los Angeles?
You know what would be really novel? Actaully setting a movie in Toronto :D.
but filming it in Boston.
Heh. Odd thing about the Jackal was that it had several scenes set in Montreal, but the climactic final chase sequence, set in the Washington metro, was filmed in the Montreal metro.
Oh, here’s a non-cheesy, non-action movie that had a sequence set in Montreal for no apparent reason: The Red Violin.
The Hollywood sign. Or a vast urban sprawl in general and one of the two cultural centers of America (don’t laugh) in particular.
Blown Away, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges was set and filmed in Boston.
The crappy Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was filmed and took place in my home town of Savannah, Georgia. Very few movies are set here.
Isn’t it disturbing that the two biggest landmarks of Los Angeles (the Hollywood sign and Disneyland) are both in the suburbs, and one of them specifically refers to the suburb it’s in?
(Now that I think of it, there’s also the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but you can’t really blow that up…)
As someone said once, Los Angeles: 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis.
Upstate NY? The only ones I can think of are Road Trip and one scene in Mars Attacks! Both of which were played mainly for the rural/college town humor value.
Now, if you had to pick a state to film a modern epic in, NY would be a decent place to film in, since per square mile it’s about the most geographically diverse state. But you have those pesky areas of population in the way of historical epics.
I suppose because Jack Nicholson was an astronaut, Terms of Endearment was set in Houston. Movies filmed/set here are cherished – Reality Bites, The Chase (with Charlie Sheen – my wife was an extra), Tin Cup and of course Urban Cowboy (except with some googling shows that it in fact wasn’t filmed in Houston), Paris, Texas, and a few others.
The Crow was set in Detroit.
Innocent Blood was set in Pittsburgh, as I remember.
A couple of Hitchcock movies are set in Santa Rosa, and surrounding areas, in Northern California. Not far from where I live.
And it’s not really explict onscreen, but the last two episodes of Bubblegum Crisis are actually set in suburban Topeka, Kansas.
Ok, I might have made one of those up.
Bubba Ho Tep was set in Nacogdoches.
Hmmm, care to elaborate? I can’t imagine NY State even coming close to CA in diversity. California has ocean (subdivided into islands, different kinds of beaches; rocky, sandy, etc.), mountains, urban areas, sweepings plains/grasslands, rolling hills, almost tropical looking areas, deserts, and huge forests. The parts of NY I’ve been to have, well, lots of trees . . .