I happened to be flipping around and caught the last hour, or so, of The Bucket List movie. In one scene Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson are walking in front of the Taj Mahal. As they walk around, the hills and landscape in the background looks like a painting. It has the Leonardo da Vinci sfumato (Italian-smoked off) look.
Has anyone been to the Taj Mahal? Did it look like that in person?
Yup, several times. Yes, it does. I’m not sure what it is about the Taj Mahal, just great proportions or what, but it just seems to command the viewing space the way the subject of a painting does.
Thanks-
I think that’s why I never noticed the distant background all these years in pictures, movies, etc. I was too focused on the grandeur of the marble mausoleum. In the movie, they walk around the perimeter for a while, so I happened to notice what was in the background.
This first five seconds of this clip does not do the movie scene, or the site justice, but it is all I could find. It almost looks fake. In the movie, the mausoleum, Morgan, Jack, the plants and water in the foreground are bathed in sunlight. It’s crisp and sharp, then you look in the distance.
Ewwwwww that dialogue “Shah JEE-han”, though. How could they have shot that in real-world Agra without learning that the emperor’s name was “Shah JaHAN”?
But yeah, the Taj pretty much looks like that.
(And yeah, Delhi air quality probably has something to do with the haziness.)
Maybe it was an intentional choice, to reflect that the characters weren’t familiar with the correct pronunciation?
Pictures of the Taj Mahal are usually taken from the front of the building. Which is why I hadn’t realized it’s built with a river right behind it. And there’s a park across the river. So there’s no tall buildings nearby to loom over it.
Here’s a view of the back of the Taj Mahal.
When I visited it, I was surprised at how small it was. I think I imagined it being bigger.
Nice. I’ve never seen it from that perspective.
Really? I found it quite large. It’s like 240 feet high. I almost didn’t go because I didn’t want to deal with the tourist scene, but I’m glad I made the slight detour to Agra on the way from Jaipur to Delhi.
I got there really early, so I got to take a photo of my wife before the crowds arrived (well pre-AI, nothing removed or added to the photo):
And a perspective from Agra looking onto the Taj Mahal:
I had heard there are always big crowds? And there used to be litter?
It looks large in all the photos, videos, etc. I remember the picture of Princess Diana sitting in front. It seemed huge.
Nice picture you took of your wife.
That bit at the start of the clip totally does look fake. It probably is. The foreground with moving people is real. The rest of the grounds, the building, and into the distance? Maybe, maybe not.
The interior shots? Hard to say whether that’s a set or the real interior.
If you could see the whole clip from the movie, I’m pretty sure the part with Morgan and Jack walking around was real.
That’s pretty impressive! Have you got a picture of the basement of the Alamo?
I think because it is a painting. I don’t believe that there are any mountains or hills in the view seen in that clip. And those clouds seem to be moving very, very quickly.
It’s a beautiful place. There are some good birds at the river out back, too. My lovely wife took a photo of me with binoculars looking not at the Taj Mahal but behind it.
Am sure it varies by season and time of day but the dust and heat haze around in high summer would have that impact.
That image is broadly as I recall in a late afternoon visit recently
Thank you for the replies. Don’t ask thinks it’s a painting. What do those of you who have seen it in person think? It’s the first five seconds of the movie clip in the third post.
I honestly don’t remember hills or anything back there, but I also went on a day with a lot of morning mist/fog, as you can tell in the photo, so I think I lack the information. I’ll have to look through my photos and see if I have any views later on in the day when it cleared up a bit.