Movies that don't look like their setting...

19 Mar 2018

List movies that don't look like the setting they are supposed to be in.

I started this because I just saw The Beguiled with Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. It's supposed to be set in Virginia but the live oaks and Spanish Moss is found much deeper south than that. The movie was filmed around New Orleans, which looks very different from Virginia. You can find the Greek Revival Antebellum white columned homes in both Virginia and Louisiana but most of the plants are different and the Mississippi Delta and bayou swamp land doesn't look like Virginia.

19 Mar 2018

All the movies and TV series where Vancouver and Toronto stand in for American cities? glasses8

Seriously, our cities are rather different beasts from yours. Famous story that may be apocryphal:

The crime show Night Heat shot on location in Toronto with a Canadian crew and mostly Canadian cast, but was supposed to be set in a US city (forget which one). Because Toronto was such a clean city relative to, say, New York of that period, they would scatter garbage and generally mess things up to make the location shoots look more "American". One night, they went for their break/lunch/whatever and came back to discover that all the mess had been cleaned up.

19 Mar 2018

Quote by seeker4
All the movies and TV series where Vancouver and Toronto stand in for American cities?

Seriously, our cities are rather different beasts from yours. Famous story that may be apocryphal:

The crime show Night Heat shot on location in Toronto with a Canadian crew and mostly Canadian cast, but was supposed to be set in a US city (forget which one). Because Toronto was such a clean city relative to, say, New York of that period, they would scatter garbage and generally mess things up to make the location shoots look more "American". One night, they went for their break/lunch/whatever and came back to discover that all the mess had been cleaned up.

New York City is not a typical American city at all. Parts of it are grungy, reminds me of a lot of European cities. I've been to Toronto and it looked nice but didn't look any cleaner than most cities I've seen in the USA. Toronto seemed very similar to Atlanta.

20 Mar 2018

Quote by Buz

New York City is not a typical American city at all. Parts of it are grungy, reminds me of a lot of European cities. I've been to Toronto and it looked nice but didn't look any cleaner than most cities I've seen in the USA. Toronto seemed very similar to Atlanta.

When were you there? It has definitely become "more American" over the years. And I found Atlanta to be one of the cleaner US cities that I've been to, though I was only in the district around the convention centre and nearby hotels. Didn't really venture further out.

20 Mar 2018

I'm still offended by the final scene in Point Break (the original version with Keanu Reeves). It's supposed to be Bells Beach (on the south coast of Australia), which is a fairly straight beach with low cliffs with basically no trees to be seen. Instead, the movie gives a curved beach with hills and spruce trees (it was filmed in Oregon). I'm sure there are plenty of others, but that one just hit me at the time as - "Wow, you guys aren't even trying to make this look right..."

20 Mar 2018

Parts of Jonah Hex was suppose to be set in Arizona or New Mexico's desert. Some parts of that location was filmed in a south Louisiana cane field. Some of the other desert scenes were filmed on a creek with large sand bars. Even though it was on sand it did not look like NM or AZ. The part with the gun boat was suppose to be, if I remember right, in Virginia or D.C. area. It was filmed in Bayou Gouche, LA about 45 miles SW of New Orleans. The TV show Memphis Beat was filmed in and around New Orleans.

Brandie

20 Mar 2018

I haven't seen Black Panther yet but plan to soon. Most of it was filmed here in Georgia. So I'm not sure what the setting is supposed to be yet. The Hunger Games movies are mostly filmed here.

An old but really good move The Long Riders was filmed in northeast Georgia but is set in the Midwest, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota. It is a movie about the James Gang (Frank & Jesse James & The Younger brothers.)

The movie Cold Mountain, supposed to be set in North Carolina & Virginia during the Amercian Civil Wat was filmed in Romania. I read that the producers couldn't find enough undeveloped scenery and found that part of Romania looked like the Appalachians.

The Last of The Mohicans, set in upstate New York during The French & Indian War of the 1850s was filmed in western North Carolina.

20 Mar 2018

A lot of times the issue isn't so much that things are inaccurate, but rather that they're simply misrepresented. An example very close to me is the movie The Score from 2001. The movie is set in Montreal (and was filmed on location), and yet 95% of the scenes were filmed in Old Montreal just to present the city with an extremely palpable European feel to it. Montreal does have a fairly apparent European aura (it's arguably the metropolis that combines the American/European cultures the most admirably in the entire world), but it's nowhere near as conspicuous as what's shown in the movie.

To put things into perspective, Old Montreal is mostly just one main street (ie. Saint-Paul street) that follows the Old Port for around a mile with a few minor streets that run perpendicular to it. And it probably only represents 1% of Montreal's total territory; no bullshit, our gay village is actually much larger than that. Needless to say, it's also an extremely touristic spot and the majority of what you can find there are souvenir shops where Asian tourists looove to buy wooden sculptures or other Canada/Quebec paraphernalia. A few interesting bars/restaurants too, but still relatively limited in number. You certainly won't see people living their daily lives and buying their groceries there as what's shown in the movie, haha.

It especially makes me laugh because realistically, every location shown is extremely close to one another: DeNiro's apartment, the spot where he meets Norton, the building where the theft finally takes place, they're all literally a 2 minutes walk from one another. The movie actually feels pretty damn claustrophobic when you're any familiar with Montreal.

Anyway, if you ever come to visit Montreal you'll still have all of those charming locations from the 17th century fully available to you, but just don't expect Montreal to be all that. I'd say that the great majority of today's Montreal territory was in fact developed fairly recently, between 1900-1950; remember that most cities grew exponentially and that Montreal more than tripled its population in the last 100 years. The scene shown below at 0:38-1:16 is actually a dozen times more representative of what the residential areas of Montreal really look like: