[QUOTE=CalMeacham] The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – the New Jersey scenes. I’m from New Jersey, and Pepper Mill grew up in Grover’s Mill.
1.) The New Brunswick scenes definitely weren’t shot in New Brunswick. But I have to give credit to the movie for even acknowledging that New Brunswick exists.
2.) Ain’t no palm trees in Grover’s Mill
3.) I think the Yoyodyne plant as shown is actually Bigger than Grover’s Mill.
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Having often driven through Grover’s Mill on the way from Princeton to the Cranbury Book Worm, there is hardly a Grover’s Mill in Grover’s Mill anymore. There are lots of little towns in NJ, still on the signs, that don’t really exist anymore.
Here’s my list
In the bad monster movie, The Beginning of the End, giant grasshoppers march from Champaign to Chicago - with those tall Illinois mountains visible in the background.
In IQ, where Walter Matthau plays Einstein, they took great care to refurbish a gas station in Hopewell to look like a mid-50s gast station. However they had Einstein ride around the real Nassau Square - without bothering to disguise the signs on the modern stores.
In A Beautiful Mind, they shot the Princeton scenes in Princeton - but it looks like they shot the MIT scenes also in Princeton. It sure wasn’t MIT. You also never heard the train going by the Nash’s house, which was located just feet from the New York / Philadelphia line and maybe 100 feet from the Princeton Junction station. They have the interior wrong also, but I’ll give them that.
One more. In the first Nero Wolfe on TV (not the good one on A&E) Archie drives to a marina, with lots of nice boats. None of them in Manhattan. Does it count that Archie also never had a problem getting a parking space in mid-town Manhattan?
The A&E one, on the other hand, was practically perfect - down to shirt color.
But Grover’s Mill does exist – Pepper Mill lived there until she took up with me. It’s been absorbed into West Windsor, but it’s still a recognized part of it.
Heck, the actual Mill is still there. As is the windmill someone shot at, thinking it was a Martian Tripod.
Too many for San Francisco. Bullitt, they’re basically driving all over the place with no regard whatsoever for continuity. Play Misty For Me, they walk along having an unbroken conversation, and every time the camera switches they’re ~100 miles away from the last location. Pacific Heights: Potrero Hill, actually. Quicksilver: bike messenger with a million dollar loft apartment. Mrs. Doubtfire: a multi-million dollar Steiner house, owned by a jobless actor and his interior decorator ex-wife.
And my favorite: The Wedding Planner. Hundreds of people gather to watch free movies in Golden Gate Park (has never happened) at night (you don’t want to be in GGP at night, ever) with no one wearing a coat (you would freeze to death) next to a bunch of carnival rides (that don’t exist) and then it starts pouring down rain (harder than I’ve ever seen it rain in SF in my life). Ugh.
[QUOTE=Mangetout] Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. One moment, they’re driving through green, rolling hills in the English countryside - the next, they’re driving past sun-scorched vineyards…
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Yeah! And then, they’re flying! How unrealistic can you get…
[QUOTE=Morbo]
Too many for San Francisco. Bullitt, they’re basically driving all over the place with no regard whatsoever for continuity. Play Misty For Me, they walk along having an unbroken conversation, and every time the camera switches they’re ~100 miles away from the last location.
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Also true for the chase scenes in Prague in “Mission: Impossible.” Tom Cruise runs around a corner and suddenly he’s at another location on the other side of the river, ten miles away. He runs around another corner and he’s ten miles away again. If you have any knowledge of the city at all it looks jarringly like he’s teleporting.
“RoboCop” was supposed to be set in Detroit, but it was so clearly Dallas that the suggestion it was somewhere else borders on hilarious.
In the 1989 indie film Chameleon Street, the scenes set at Yale University were actually filmed at the University of Michigan Central Campus. I had some serious cognitive dissonance when the protagonist started talking about being at Yale, and the Michigan Student Union building was featured prominently on-screen.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
But Grover’s Mill does exist – Pepper Mill lived there until she took up with me. It’s been absorbed into West Windsor, but it’s still a recognized part of it.
Heck, the actual Mill is still there. As is the windmill someone shot at, thinking it was a Martian Tripod.
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Well, existing is a relative term. Down the road from me was Marshall’s Corner (named after the guy who really found the gold at Sutter’s Mill) - population - a bowling alley, a motel, and a few goats. I think some guy was the honorary mayor.
I thought of one more, by the way. In Star Trek IV, the whale tank, which I think was supposed to be in Golden Gate Park, is actually the big tank in the Monterey Aquarium. Not a whale to be seen there.
[QUOTE=Alessan]
Bear in mind that unlike New York or LA, only Chicagoans are in any way familiar with Chicago landmarks.
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And yet, that doesn’t stop innumerable and enormous plot holes from surfacing in movies set in New York (and presumably L.A.).
Rumble In The Bronx has already been mentioned, or as I like to call it, Rumble In Vancouver. The end scene with the hovercraft running amok on the beach had me rolling. I’ve been to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. I’d prefer to be on the beach shown in the movie any day, even with a runaway hovercraft.
In Spider-Man 2, one of the main action sequences is of Spider-Man having to stop a runaway elevated subway train that’s going through the middle of midtown, amid tall office buildings. There is no such line – the only elevated trains in Manhattan are north of 96th St. through residential (apartment building) areas. It seemed to me to be a Chicago el, if not completely fictitious.
And every New Yorker I know who saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, which has a huge oceanic tidal wave crashing into Manhattan from the east as a crucial plot element, had the same reaction: What happened to Brooklyn, Queens and the rest of Long Island? Manhattan doesn’t border the ocean; its eastern boundary is the East River, which divides it from Long Island. There is no way for a wave to go straight into midtown and flood, say, the main branch of the Library because the largest island in the continental US acts as one big-ass buffer.
I already knew I’d have to suspend disbelief in terms of environmental science to watch the movie. But geography was taken down by friendly fire!
PS - Is that Wikipedia entry for Long Island for real? It says: The Native American name for Long Island is Big Dick, meaning "The Island that Pays Tribute". Just because it should be true, doesn’t mean it is true!
[QUOTE=Voyager]
I thought of one more, by the way. In Star Trek IV, the whale tank, which I think was supposed to be in Golden Gate Park, is actually the big tank in the Monterey Aquarium. Not a whale to be seen there.
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This was on TV not long ago, the first time I’d seen it since I moved out here. I noticed the whole “whale center” was the aquarium (I think even the outside of the building). But what I got stuck on was. . . why doesn’t anyone they stop on the street know where Alameda is? Not even a general “Somewhere in the East Bay”?
[QUOTE=The New and Improved Superman] Bruce Almighty was set in Buffalo, NY (my hometown), but virtually nothing in the film looks like it.[…] in at least one scene the ‘street’ is instantly recognizable (to me at least) as the generic ‘city street’ set used by “Seinfeld”, “Friends” and any number of NYC-based shows.
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Is that the same urban street with the gentle curve (a lot of those in Manhattan?), so that the camera can’t actually see the end of the block?
I think I saw that one in Cloverfield, too, though they actually blocked it pretty well.
[QUOTE=An Arky] True Grit had scenes supposedly in Yell County, Arkansas, but somehow failed to account for the lack of snowy, 12000 ft pointy-topped mountains. There’s an 1800 foot flat-topped mountain that looms large to the west, but no peaks, and rarely is it snow-covered.
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It was actually filmed outside Ridgeway, Colorado, which is not that far from Telluride.
Speaking of Colorado being a stand-in for another place; The Father Dowling Mysteries series which supposedly takes place in Chicago, in fact was filmed in Denver. If you watch carefully, virtually all the cars have Colorado plates and watch for bus signs or billboards. Also, on wide shots, you can occasionally catch the Rockies (the mountains, not the baseball team) in the background.
[QUOTE=Omniscient]
No, they make it clear that it’s Chicago. They don’t specifically call it by name, but they use all the famous street names in the loop and the Subway train is labeled with “Loop”. The trace in one of scenes is to a 312 area code and they show maps that are obviously of Chicago. Additionally the Wachowski’s are from Chicago, which is probably notable.
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I couldn’t tell you why, but for some reason I had the impression that *The Matrix * was filmed in Australia.
“I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” was set in the Bahamas but was actually filmed in Mexico. The fact that they show mountains should tell you that it was not filmed in the Bahamas. (Highest point in the Bahamas is 209 feet)
[QUOTE=Ferret Herder]
I don’t know that I’d recognize LA. I think many Americans at least might recognize Chicago from the Sears Tower or the Hancock Building, but neither of those were featured, which is what made the Chicagoans go “wtf?” as to us it became obvious what city it was intended to be, but the majority of the scenery - obvious and unobvious - didn’t match up.
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Yeah, I think Chicago is probably one of the most visually iconic cities out there since so much of what makes it popular are the huge landmarks. Moreso than LA. NYC, Chicago and San Francisco are easily the most visually recognizable if not the best known.
If Wiki is to be believed the original script was much more specific about the scenes being set in Chicago, but then it was made to be more homogeneous in production. This could be why parts of the dialog make it abundantly clear but the visual effects less-so. Overall it makes it a little odd.
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
Are TV shows okay? The US Queer as Folk is set in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a very distinctive city. There are no freaking bridges in the show, and very few hills. The weird thing is, there’s an episode where they go to New York, and they obviously bothered to leave Toronto or wherever and actually go to New York. I mean, it’s clearly and recognizably New York. But they couldn’t be bothered to even take establishing shots of Pittsburgh?
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I vaguely recall reading that the City of Pittsburgh objected to the show and made it clear that they would make it very hard to do any such filming in Pittsburgh.
