Central. Not far from New Brunswick. But, as mentioned, the New Brunswick of Buckaroo Banzai didn’t look right, and obviously wasn’t filmed there. They talk about going to New Brunswick in 1776, but don’t actually show it (plus, it’s about 200 years too early).
My present home is doing a better job of showing up in contemporary movies. They filmed part of Grownups 2 at the athletic field where MilliCal played field hockey. And part of the opening scenes of Ted features the golf course with the Big Orange Dinosaur not far from my house (and that’s soon to be gone, sadly).
I was born in Morristown, not too far away.
The Goonies was filmed and set in 1980s Oregon, and it felt just like my childhood. The damp, the adventures from the slightly boring early fall, the semi-rural suburbia, everything. (Well, everything except for the real pirate rich stuff and criminal family on the lam.)
Nice place, very historical. Hiked through the Jockey Hollow trail twice in Scouts. I’ve got ac cousin living there now.
Can’t recall any films set there, either.
Bugs Bunny says “This don’t look like Poith Amboy” once, when popping out of a tunnel he’s dug (“Musta taken a wrong toin at Albu-kow-kee”) Og knows what Bugs wanted to go to Perth Amboy for. But it’s the only mention of that NJ town I can recall from Hollywood.
Barry Levinson is twelve years older than me, so Diner and Tin Men depict a slightly different Baltimore than the one I grew up in, but it’s pretty close.
My folks took us to Jockey Hollow many times during my youth. One of my mother’s favorite places.
And my brother had cello lessons in New Brunswick - I think on the college campus. We used to play on a tree with broad spreading branches while he was in there. We called it the Elephant Tree, because one branch looked like its trunk.
How did you like Hairspray (either version)? Jon Waters reportedly went to infinite trouble to make both films, and the stage show, look like Baltimore, not any other city, and 1962, not any other year.
Hmm… no real movies set in 1970s-1980s suburban Houston that are about children or teenagers that I know about.
However, “Urban Cowboy” does sort of define the way the adults of the time dressed, and the kinds of things that local media gushed over. We had commercials with Lone Star beer and giant armadillos, and boots, belt buckles and big hair weren’t just bad stereotypes for a little while there.
The chase scene at the end of Dirty Harry. I live about 1/2 mile away from the quarry where it took place. Note that the quarry was replaced by a shopping center (which is still there, albeit a shadow of its former self) in the late 1970s. (I very vaguely remember the Go-Kart track in the background at one point; before that, it was a miniature golf course, and after, I think it was the headquarters for the Victoria Station restaurant chain.)
Another Dazed and Confuzed fan who grew up in a smaller town in Texas. I was a Freshman in high school in 1976 and, yes, we had those initiation rites. We were the last class that had them in my district. No more paddles, no more backwards clothes, no flour and egg washes. We still had the senior will for a couple of years.
I’d say it was pretty spot on for small town Wisconsin grade school in the late 60s as well.
No, not specific details like Radio Orphan Annie or Hot Dam Oldsmobiles (though our town firetruck might have been the same vintage as the one in the movie), but the feel of the movie was spot on. We buttoned up for winter exactly like Randy ( I think I wore a scarf and galoshes like that), the way Miss Shields ran her classroom, “the bell rang” being an absolute, too many cords in the one lone power outlet (it probably helped the similarity that our house was older than the one in the movie), and tons of other details. When I first saw the movie, it was like going home again.
That godawful remake of Red Dawn was shot, not just in my city, but in my neighborhood. We got to watch a couple of takes of a car wiping out someone’s fence and squealing around acorner with a Hummer in pursuit 
The setting is supposed to be in the Pacific Northwest, but it was really Royal Oak, Michigan.
(Incidentally, the script originally had China as the bad guys, but the Chinese government heard about it and bitched, and the producers wimped out and make the invaders North Korea instead.)
An elderly co-worker of mine swore it was set in the early 50s, based on a lot of the cars, but the director has said it was sometime in the late 30s-early 40s. (Wasn’t there a red-haired kid in a coonskin cap? Wasn’t that a 50s thing? How long did Ovaltine sponsor the “Little Orphan Annie” radio show anyway?
I was a little kid in Topeka in the 60s and believe me, the place could have passed for a much earlier decade; all the houses, cars, fashions and infrastructure seemed to be holdovers from some WWII-related economic boom. Much of the west and midwest was kind of like that.
From Wikipedia:
This puts the movie in either 1939 (After Wizard of Oz) or 1940 (Last Little Orphan Annie sponsored by Ovaltine).
There are a surprising number of good books and movies set in rural Northern Louisiana where I am from. Some of them miss the dates by a fair bit but they still mesh with my cultural experience.
Steel Magnolias was written by someone my stepfather knows personally.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood had lots of relevant references.
The Man in the Moonwith a young Reese Witherspoon is probably the one that was most spot-on for me at least.
My mother has the same reaction to A Christmas Story. The opening scene, and the real-life location of the Higbee’s Department Store where Ralphie ogled the Red Ryder BB gun (with a compass in the stock!) was Public Square in Cleveland. Just as she remembers it from her childhood. The Palmer house, too. (The school scenes were shot in Ontario, though.)
And Paul Newmans The Drowning Pool
In the story where that character originated, it was an actual raccoon skin, not a manufactured fad accessory.
SLC Punk! is a very good representation of what life was like in the 80’s to early 90’s in Salt Lake City growing up as a punk or outsider kid. Fun fact: I know the guy that told the Evanston beer - 666 tattoo thing in real life that was coopted for the movie. I heard that story about 20 times years before the movie was even written.
The Blue Iguana faithfully renders my childhood experiences in a Mexican tax haven filled with neo-noir cultural influences.
In combination with the lesbian surreality of Mulholland Drive, I daresay my formative years have been accurately deconstructed on film.