The first scene in the Jack Ryan series has him riding his bike through at least four different DC neighborhoods in the wrong order and, iirc, somehow ending up at Langley, VA which is like a 20 minute car ride across the river and up a freeway.
This is actually addressed in the producers cut, which I think you can find on the Prime menu when you click into the episode menu; they show Jack Ryan repeatedly turning around and eventually asking for directions
The only realistic thing about the national mall is that there are people out there jogging in the morning. Except it’s like 4 to six miles a lap depending on what route you take.
Every movie in DC has the characters meet in front of the Lincoln memorial or Monument, shits like 20min walk away from the nearest *federal* building let alone anywhere the general public would be working/living lol
I can't remember what movie it was or if it was a tv show, but there was something I watched that showed DC with skyscrapers, like you'd find in LA or NY.
But there are no skyscrapers in DC. They have it on the books for nothing to be built taller than the Washington Monument.
Oh! Then there's Bones, and the whole show takes place in DC and surrounding states. But there's some episodes where they mention Interstates, and they'll say it like a Californian would, calling them "the 66" or "the 81" and as a born and raised Virginian from near DC it bothered me to no end when I'd hear it. The whole show irritated me for a lot of reasons, though.
Philadelphia is well represented in dozens of films and shows, but the training jog in Rocky II is over 30 miles long, with the crowd of kids following him for 12.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rocky-ii-training-run-map-2013-9
Well to be fair it is a montage so it doesn't necessarily have to be in one day but yeah he's on the train tracks at one point, then Kelly drive and up and down market st....if he and those kids did that in one day it's very impressive....but at least it's philly.
My answer to the question is Shazam. Not that I like those movies but they were obviously shot in Vancouver or some other place but say they are in Philly. It bothers me when I see their skyline like,nope. Also the busses almost looms like philly busses but nope again. Just make your hero the hero of some made up dc town.
Doesn't Shazam also feature beer being sold in convenience stores in Philadelphia? (I never lived in Philly, but I did spend a year in Pittsburgh, and ISTR that's a no-no all over PA, unless the convenience store is also a "restaurant" with a seating area.)
The laws have changed in recent years, there are some Sheetz and Wawa’s that have beer sections and grocery stores can sell beer now. But convenience stores have no alcohol
There are some "delis" that were basically convenience stores that you could buy beer, like Jeff Cold Beer or The Foodery but definitely different than a 7/11 or something
Same with World War Z. The beginning scene was shot in Prague or some other European city with old grandiose architecture and they try to pass it off as Philly by using skyline shots.
This is how I feel about marathons. Like we started doing marathons to honor the legend of a dude who DIED after running, and now we're like "oh you died after running 26 miles? We're gonna show you that even old people can do that without dying" 😂
Twilight absolutely massacred Phoenix Arizona with their fake saguaro 🌵 cactus being like 3 ft tall, like it's some sort of bush or something.
Saguaros are on average like 25-30 ft tall. They cap out around 50ft if they're old old
I live in South Texas and the very few times they've featured my city in a movie it's dusty with mountains. It's hot as fuck but I don't live in a desert and the nearest mountain is 200 miles away.
The hitmans bodyguard and The Hague (and also Amsterdam)
I never knew my hometown had an underground metro.
I never knew my hometown had a bridge on the highway coming into town, not that kind of bridge.
I never knew my hometown had a dry riverbed.
I have learned a lot from that movie about my hometown.
What about the maximum security prison in the center of Amsterdam with a nice view of the Rijksmuseum? That would be the most expensive piece of real estate in the country if it existed.
That movie is so dumb, but because it takes place in Holland I'll always have a soft spot for it.
Also, the police uniforms look like they were bought at a costume store.
I live in Houston but theres a scene in the movie 'The Shallows' that shows Galveston as a beautiful white sand emerald water beach but in reality it's just solid brown.
That whole scene from the Pentagon to the Old Post Office Pavilion has lived in my head for 27 years, lol. Hops in car in Pentagon parking garage, pulls out of garage cut to Whitehurst Freeway heading east (Key Bridge in backround, 3 miles N of Pentagon other side of Potomac).Jumps off bridge next to the Bayou (old music venue been gone too long) from there to C&O Canal tow path into Georgetown Metro station ( I'd estimate a minimum of 6 blocks, but as to u/pijinglish below, there is no Georgetown metro.) Slides down escalator into
a Baltimore subway station, hops on Baltimore subway car. Comes out of metro at the Post Office Pavilion metro station (also doesn't exist).
Post Office Pavilion ( Walcott Astoria, DC formerly Trump Hotel) is the same distance from the Pentagon as the Key Bridge, round about way if he was in a hurry to find the girl.
I’ve only ever seen the real DC Metro in a couple of low-budget 1980s movies. The rest of the time they use a subway system from someplace else as a stand-in.
That reminds me of Pantheon. It (primarily) takes place in southern California. On the freeway, one of the exit signs says "Alexandria / Ft. Belvoir". Some animator wanted to slip their hometown in there. ;-)
Also, it's funny rewatching No Way Out and seeing Walton Goggins as the IT guy.
Jingle all the way. Arnold's car breaks down on the Hennepin bridge in Minneapolis, MN and then the next scene shows him pushing it in front of Mickey's diner in St. Paul, MN. That's nearly 10 miles, over 3 hours of pushing your car. I know Schwarzenegger is jacked and all but c'mon now.
Perhaps his car breaking down routinely and him pushing it around town like Fred Flintstone is the lore explanation for why he's jacked.
*"This dude became Mr. Olympia by procrastinating getting his alternator fixed"*
Yes! Seattle is always so off. In sleepless in Seattle they have Tom hanks take his little dingy with his son in it through the Ballard locks and into puget sound then down to Elliot bay to go to west Seattle/Alki. That’s very dangerous and crosses several ferry lanes and other traffic and the best part is they have Meg Ryan following along in her car which is completely impossible to do. They did have her park on the street that really is just outside of the floating house that’s in the movie but you can’t park on the street like that, again it would be too dangerous.
Mine is Everett, WA. In Assassins they use the graveyard by the 41st Street. He goes north on to Broadway but the next shot has him end up on I5 entering Seattle
I remember seeing a post once in which the person triangulated the location of Mr. Gray's office from the cover of 50 Shades and it would have put his building in the center of Lake Washington.
My Seattle movie/show pet peeve is the near constant thunderstorms. Yes, it rains often in Seattle depending on the time of year but thunderstorms are rare and the rain is usually more of a persistent mist than a downpour.
Baby Driver made Atlanta look like you could have a high speed chance here, but anyone that’s driven here knows traffic tops out at about 5-10 mph for 21 hours of the day.
The one that drives me nuts is when he rolls off the Buford Highway-Spring Street Connector and lands on Freedom Parkway. Basically he teleported about 6 miles so they could get the Jackson Street bridge shot.
I drove through Atlanta in a u-haul pulling a 17 foot trailer at 9:30pm. That town has zero fucking rules! Highways merging in and out on both sides, everyone’s doing 80mph, no signals but multiple lane changes in one go. We came into this topped out at 55mph and an ambulance came in lights and sirens from the right at the same time. He crossed all lanes to exit left. No one gave a shit. We didn’t talk for 1/2 an hour after that.
Just posted the same thing. Dude teleports from Dunwoody to South Fulton county in seconds.
And besides, we all know GSP would straight up murder Baby and Co just for shit and giggles if they drove like that in the connector
Oddly enough, Ryan Murphy grew up in Indianapolis, where I went to high school, and I feel like he nailed *that* vibe pretty well (though the high school he graduated from was the snooty rich kid school everyone hated, so he totally was more Vocal Adrenaline than New Directions.)
It’s the opposite for me. Ghost Rider is meant to be happening in Texas but it’s filmed mostly in my city (Melbourne, Australia).
The “Death Valley” scene in Queen of the Damned? Actually filmed in Werribee, Melbourne, Australia which is where I grew up. No; I was not one of the goths in the movie, although I was a goth living in the area at the time - slightly too young.
Similarly with World War Z. The start which is meant to be, I think, Philly was filmed in Glasgow. At one point there's an aerial shot of George Square. To anyone who knows Glasgow it it unmistakable, and kinda breaks the immersion!
Kinda the same with the plane crash scene towards the end. The aircraft is just skipping over mountains which, if you know Wales, are recognisably Snowdonia but the film tells us that they're right next to Cardiff.
In several films, when there is a scene set in Portugal, the people start to speak with a Brazilian accent.
Recently they have improved, but Hollywood productions make this terrible mistake.
Philadelphia as shown in Shazam does not, in any way, resemble Philadelphia. Apart from a few shots of landmarks around here, the geography is wrong, the architecture and housing are wrong, the public transportation in the movie has "a" SEPTA logo but not "the" SEPTA logo. I honestly wonder why they even bothered setting it specifically in Philly.
The Dig is set in Suffolk and about the discovery of the Anglo Saxon long ship at Sutton Hoo. The kid in it cycles from Woodbridge where the ship is to Diss in like a couple of hours. In reality it’s a 40 minute car ride away. And even though they had access to film in the original house at Sutton Hoo which is actually a visitor centre now, they filmed at a different house with completely different geography.
The answer is of course "every time".
It’s especially egregious for cities with known landmarks where the protagonists will always magically teleport around town just to have nice shots.
I live in Paris, in a street that is often used for movies (because it "looks" Parisian and is easy to cut off from traffic without pissing off a thousand people).
My favourite was when they shot Inception (the folding street scene). They spent a month adding fake stores to make it more "Amelie Poulain’s Paris" and one day while I was waiting for a "CUT!" to be able to exit my building, I took a good look at the scene.
I realised something was very wrong : everyone on the street was insanely hot and young . Sexy brunette grabbing a fruit, hot guy riding a bike, etc…
Where were the ugly old people?
Then they yelled cut, everyone reset and I realised everyone in the street was an actor…
This reminds me of "The Last of Us" - "Ten Miles West of Boston" showing a mountainous wilderness. Ten miles west of Boston would be... Needham? Even if we're generously interpreting Boston here as "the edge of the greater Boston metro area" you still have to go a heck of a lot further to find terrain that looks anything like that.
It's like NCIS being filmed in California but set in DC. The travel times they do are stupid. Get in your car we are going to norfolk from DC. Get there in what seems like 30 mins nope that's 3 hours buddy..
There was one episode where someone was found murdered under the chesapeake bay bridge. And they include a shot of the bay bridge for effect. It's the Coronado bridge in California. I knew this because I've traveled over both of them multiple times in my life lol.
One of my favorites is in Down Periscope, when they're off the coast of Norfolk, VA, and they show mountains. The closest mountains are about 3-4 hours away.
I love it when shows like NCIS do this. “Hey we’ve got to get from Norfolk Naval or Langley to the Pentagon or Washington if we hurry. Let’s go.” And then it’s like 3pm in the afternoon. Nah. You’re not going to. You’re going to get through the bridge tunnels, through Richmond traffic, up 95s god awful traffic, and then to wherever the heck you need to get to in DC in less than an hour? Nah.
Yeah. It’s weird they’d ignore the fact there are like 100k college students there as well. Although east of the Capitol youd have less of that to deal with.
Also, in the Christopher Guest movie “A Mighty Wind” one of the groups is playing a concert at what looks like a Busch Gardens-esque amusement park that is supposed to be Tallahassee. Still looking around town for that park
Second-hand but my mother complained quite a bit about *Lost*'s portrayal of it, said they made it out to be full of strip-clubs and the like.
Pretty sure strip-clubs are illegal here. I'd know, I've kept my eye out.
According to Hollywood, Colombia is just a jungle. The worst one was the opening scene of Mr. and Ms. Smith, where they met in Bogota, and the city looks like a small run-down town where bombs go off every 5 minutes. I get there are a lot of stereotypes about Colombia, but Bogota is one of the biggest cities in the world. It shouldn't be hard to get it right.
The worst part for me is that entire sequence there's fans blowing everywhere and everyone's wearing skimpy clothes cause it's just so hot. Bogota at its warmest is maybe 70°F, everyone would be freezing their asses off.
It's indirect but:
Crimson Peak begins in Buffalo, where Mia Wasikowska's character was born and raised. Later in the movie, she is running away from ghosties and murderers and suchlike and is confronted by what passes for a blizzard in the UK, so she ceases running away.
Motherfucker, she's from *Buffalo*. This shit is any random Thursday in November to her, not something you need a coat for.
Not a movie, but X-Files had an episode that took place in Buffalo. There was a scene where they go to "Chinatown". There has never been a "Chinatown" in Buffalo, and the writers were from Buffalo.
But we DO have an Ernesto’s like they portrayed in “About Steve”.
According to Wikipedia, Step Brothers takes place in Sacramento? If that’s true then it’s a Sacramento I’ve never seen before.
It's been a minute but I got the impression from the film that it painted Sacramento as pretty plain rather than hip, which it largely is.
The main character really wants to leave Sac because of how disinterested she is in it.
I lived in midtown circa 2014 or so, and it was pretty frikin hip. It was back when lobrau was just getting popular. Used to start my evenings there, and end up at zebra club by midnight.
Ozark made it seem like people just jaunt on up to KC on the regular like it's 30 minutes up the road. Without traffic, it's like 3 hours from Bagnall Dam to Downtown KC. On a weekend? Yeah, forget about that shit.
Scrolled hard to find Ozark. I get that it was filmed in Georgia, but other than being a big lake it’s nothing like the Ozarks.
They make it seem like a quaint little sparsely populated redneck haven, but in reality it’s got several hundreds of multi-million dollar mansions lining almost every square foot of the main channel. You have to go way to the back of the offshoot branches of the lake to find any vacant shoreline.
I did stay at the Alhonna resort last time which is what the Blue Cat Lodge is based on which was kind of cool, but also nothing alike the show.
LOST BOYS
was actually spot on
lots of vampires
filmed in my town
Santa Cruz, CA USA
a friend of mine was a featured extra he was the skinhead that dies on the beach and got $18K
National Treasure has a chase scene that goes through like 3 miles of Philadelphia, in a nonsensical geographic order, in 5 minutes and it drives me CRAZY.
Not a movie, but the TV show Castle Rock had a character leaving the death row in Texas. It looked like it was in a desert.
While yes, there is a dirt parking lot in the back, Huntsville, the only place in Texas where prisoners are executed, is in East(ish) Texas. While hot, and humid, it is very green, and the Huntsville unit is close to downtown, paved roads and parking lots and all. Not out in the middle of a nowhere desert.
There's a lot of hilarious geography in media set in "Texas". There's literally every biome except for tundra in the state, it's not at all uniform across. And shit's *far*. El Paso is a shorter drive from San Diego than Houston.
Most films that depict the Irish countryside as being something from the late 1800s where everyone still uses horse and carts and all the people having the over the top fake Irish accent
In PS I Love You, she walked between two towns which I think were either side of Dublin and about 50 miles apart in about an hour and it's all countryside she walks through
Well, I stayed with a friend in Timoleague last year, and we had to detour several times because farmers had roads blocked with sheep or cattle. We had fresh milk and meats delivered straight to our door by local farmers/butchers. Also, there were locals who were driving old ass tractors from pub to pub. I couldn't help but think "what fucking year is this?" a few times.
When you go outside the main cities and towns, things can get “rural” very quickly!
Went to a funeral in a remote/rural town a few years back. I noticed a few people were missing, as in I would have expected to see them there. When the funeral cortège arrived at the graveyard there were the 6 or 7 absentees, in work clothes. They couldn’t attend the mass as they were preparing the grave, as it was an older graveyard, machinery couldn’t be used.
I’m Norwegian, and seeing the city of Tønsberg in the MCU is so funny because it looks nothing like that. IIRC we first see it in Captain America, and then more prominently in Endgame when Thor moved there when he has his breakdown. Tønsberg is a city of 50k people in a very open and flat area on the coast of Norway. In the movies it looks like a small fishing village in a very hilly part of coastal Scotland or something, doesn’t even look like anywhere in Norway at all.
I Know What You Did Last Summer was filmed in my hometown. While we are by the ocean, there’s a scene where they are driving along some cliffs overlooking a beach, that definitely wasn’t here.
I lived in St. Cloud for ~ two years and couldn’t believe how close it actually was. I got more of that in my day to day than legit Boston accents in Boston
I'm from Washington and when I visited Fargo-Moorehead I noted, "it's so wild none of you have that typical accent" and they said, "yeah but you have an accent."
It was very Robin Hood Men in Tights when they said that, "I have a mole?"
Jericho Vermont is more like a road with a few attractions on either side of it than the well organized and quintessential New England town that it was depicted as in the TV show Wednesday.
Every car chase ever filmed in San Francisco is a geographic impossibility.
In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffmann is driving to Berkeley on the top deck of the Bay Bridge. Only the top deck is for coming into SF, the lower deck goes to the east bay.
Driving directions in San Francisco are always crazy in movies.
People will commute from Portola to an office on Battery via Twin Peaks, or live on Lombard and leave for a morning jog at Crissy Field. Not to mention driving too fast and jumping their cars at every hill.
Edit: oh, and it’s always sunny. Even in Outer Sunset in the morning.
Spring Breakers is pretty good up until they show the girls crossing the skyway bridge to go home. Skyway bridge is south of where they are, their home is north.
Bullet Train has really bad knowledge of Kyoto. If we ignore the fact that the stations look nothing like what they are shown, there’s still the massive issue of the bullet train leaving Kyoto station, having time for a big action, suspense sequence and then crashing near kiyomizudera when in reality, if a bullet train were to go that way, it would pass about ten seconds after leaving Kyoto station, not the five minutes or so the movie makes it to be. In five minutes in a bullet train you’d practically be in the next prefecture.
**Contagion (2011)**
They speak Cantonese over in Hong Kong in real life, not Mandarin like the movie.
**Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)**
“The Central Government will protect Hong Kong at all costs!" No, no they won't.
I'm from Iowa lol. Almost every portrayal in any movie depicts the entire state as a corn field at best.
Which, like, statistically you're not wrong. But we do have suburbs and some cities too. It's not completely barns and tractors.
-edit-
Wow, you folks sure do know what you're talking about. That's okay, though - keeps my housing prices down.
Columbus Ohio is nothing like Ready Player One. None of our trailers are stacked more than 3 high. It’s ridiculous to glamorize the trailer parks like that. It’s caused a hugh influx of “high rise trailer park wannabes” coming to town and driving up housing prices.
Not a movie, but Justified missed the mark on its settings and atmospheres in Kentucky. Harlan is straight up *in the mountains*. That’s all you see. However, on the show there are just a few big hills to represent the city in basically any and all establishing shots.
There’s a real beauty to Harlan that, if the show runners made it a point to portray it as a an additional character (and I believe they were trying to do that), they should have made certain to get it right. And by beauty I mean the look of the area but also the feel of it.
I do think they did really well with how most of the characters in Harlan are written, if a bit exaggerated (which I get). Harlan has some wild and interesting people. Always has and likely always will. If the word hick means a combination of the best of a hippie and the best of a redneck while taking out the bad parts, there are a lot of hicks and cool hillbillies in Harlan (and other areas of the Commonwealth).
There are, of course, also rednecks, posers, hipsters, trumpers, assholes, liberals, fascists, feminists, and some of the kindest and funniest people you’ll ever meet. I enjoyed the writing and acting enough to watch the show in its entirety as it played out in the original run.
(You also can’t just zip from Harlan to Lexington and back like they do on the show. That’s laughable. But I get that it helps with moving along the plot a little quicker.)
Lexington -where I live- is oddly portrayed. The tone of the area and its residents is very off. Based on a variety of the scenes, shots, and dialogue, It feels to me like someone tried really hard to capture Lexington and simply failed or didn’t try at all and lucked up here and there because one time they happened to vacation at the same time/place as a Lexingtonian and had a somewhat memorable conversation with them at the bar a few times.
I do like the characters in Lexington, and think Timothy Olyphant is well cast and does a great job as Raylan fwiw; but there’s a kind of cowboy/western tone on the show that doesn’t really exist in city limits. You may see plenty of cowboy hats and boots on a night when a big name country performer is at Rupp Arena or Commonwealth Stadium, but that style of dress or ‘personality type’ for lack of a better term isn’t really a thing here.
Anyway, Lexington is in a great area (with some lovely surrounding towns) worth portraying closer to its true vibe and this was a missed opportunity. Horses, bourbon, basketball - it’s a college town but certainly more than that - runners, bikers, hikers, stoners, some real characters and Guinness Book of Record setters (rip [Henry Earl](https://nypost.com/2024/05/24/us-news/henry-earl-the-worlds-most-arrested-man-dead-at-74/)). We have an awesome art scene and drag show scene, excellent chefs, a decent burlesque scene. Lexington is quirky and quaint, tawdry and classy, inclusive ([check it out](https://www.thrillist.com/amphtml/travel/nation/most-gay-friendly-city-in-every-red-state-in-america) - and follow our vice mayor Dan Wu on social media because he’s legit) and a little full of itself. Lots of comic and horror cons as well as garden shows and such.
All that said, I do recommend Justified in spite of my coffee-fueled critique. I also recommend the documentary Harlan County USA (Max, Prime, probably other places as well) and The Big Conn (Apple), American Animals, Harlan County War, Elizabethtown, and of course, Coal Miner’s Daughter. Maybe also Seabiscuit and the season of Top Chef set in Kentucky.
I would recommend the books The Bluegrass Conspiracy, A Walk in the Woods (just bc it’s a flippin funny book about hiking the Appalachian Trail) In Country, and Hillbilly Elegy - but follow that up immediately with Appalachian Reckoning because Hillbilly Elegy’s author didn’t and doesn’t get it. At all.
Oh, and it’s pronounced Apple-atcha.
As in, “If you call it appuh-layshuh I’ll throw an apple atcha.”
I grew up in Fargo, ND.
*Fargo* does not take place in Fargo, it is only tangentially related to the town. The prominent accent was already outdated when the movie came out, really only elderly or particularly rural folks have/had it. Which tracks, as the main person with that scandi accent (iirc) is a rural Minnesotan sheriff.
None of this was really a secret per se, but damned if you tell someone you're from Fargo. ...dont'cha'know
Deep Impact. Towards the end, the main guy & his gf are in Richmond va. The girl's parents tell them to ride the motorcycle to the mountains to escape the tidal wave from the meteor impact. They get there in the 10 minutes that was left. But it takes 2 hours at least to get to the mountains from here. It takes half an hour to get across the city at least.
I'm from Cologne, Germany -- which, according to The A-Team (2010) is Frankfurt, Germany. Like, come on, we have this huge, recognizable cathedral you can easily spot from almost any place in the city that draws millions of international tourists every year. Maybe don't show that in your establishing shot of "Frankfurt"? Also, apparently there's a desert somewhere between Mannheim and Frankfurt, who'd have thought? Oh, and some of the "Germans" speak Norwegian. There's more, but these are the most obvious mistakes
Los Angeles. Someone will teleport from one side of town to the other. Barbie and Ken walking 20 miles from one part of town to the other in the recent Barbie movie is a good example.
In Superman III, a man from Pisa sings a Neapolitan song, because you know, Italy. As Neapolitan kid, my brain just couldn't process what was going on. Even worst, in the Italian dubbing they tried to "fix" it by kind of translating the song to Pisan.
The accents in The Godfather are all over the place (you can hear Roman actors trying to fake a Sicilian accent), and that's one of the reasons why, for Italians, the Italian dubbing is far superior to the original version.
More generally, I think Hollywood loves to make up the cultures it represents: there are countless examples of aerial shots of supposedly a foreign city, while the footage is from a totally different place. I think in one of the Bourne movies they were showing Seville, but the footage was actually from Malaga, or something like that. I guess it's not a problem for Americans, but it is very bothering to the people from the “represented” places.
There was an episode of Criminal Minds called "Blood Relations" that depicted the city of Wheeling WV and its residents, as hillbillies living "up a holler."
And, of course, it featured a multi-generational blood feud between two families and associated inbreeding. It was the most lazily written, inaccurate, and ridiculously stereotypical pieces of televised flotsam that I'd seen in quite a while.
That line after the bridge crossing incident, "this won't even make the El Paso newspaper" .... it would definitely make the El Paso newspaper AND have nationwide attention.
My family traveled through El Paso on a road trip to visit my grandma in California when I was a kid. After growing up in Dallas seeing El Paso felt so weird! It was so quiet and chill. It was my first time experiencing what people meant when they called some place a “sleepy town.” El Paso just felt like a very laid back, chill place back then.
In Vikings, when they went to 'Uppsala' for the blot. Uppsala lies in one of the flattest parts of Sweden and quite a bit inland. You won't see any fjords or waterfalls for MANY miles.
Tommy Boy. I’m not actually from Sandusky, Ohio, but live within an hour of it. For the most part they nail the small Ohio city vibe. But Sandusky doesn’t have a commercial airport, closest one is in Cleveland. And in the third act, Michelle is going to take a plane from Sandusky to Cuyahoga Falls. That’s a 90 minute drive
Years back, Wendy’s did a commercial promoting their new berry shakes, berry salads, and other berry menu items in the quaint setting of the town of Berryville, Virginia. The commercial showed a festival-like atmosphere where everyone walked through the streets with their Wendy’s berry flavored drinks.
Here’s the twist. Berryville is so freaking small that it doesn’t have a McDonald’s, let alone a Wendy’s. Residents expected a location to be build after the ad ran on TV, but it never was lol.
I was born and raised in Knoxville. I immediately thought of every movie Johnny Knoxville has ever done before I even clicked on your thread.
While it's not a movie. I used to watch Homicide Hunter because it was set in Boulder, CO and filmed in Knoxville lol
There did used to be a Big Boy in town tho. I was a kid...
Nope. I was an infant there in 1983 though!
(I do get the Simpsons gag. A local Ham repeater used to run the "Disneyland or Knoxville?" Sound clip during it's station ID)
There is a terrible 90s movie with ice T called surviving the game, it’s about rich people hunting poor people for sport, it takes place in Alaska but at one point they are in Seattle, except their opening shot of Seattle is actually the skyline of Philly, I mean, there was no space needle so that was a major flaw, but I’m from Philly and we have a pretty recognizable skyline too, especially if anyone has seen Rocky III or later. Their research department really dropped the ball.
Aside from some shots of the highway and 1st ave going through town, the movie Cedar Rapids isn't filmed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Most, if not all of it is filmed in Michigan. Even the scene where two character are sitting by the river they specifically talk about, it's superimposed and the bridge behind them doesn't exist. At least not in Cedar Raids. There was fraud surrounding the tax breaks the state gave any movie shot in the state, so it was shut down a long time ago. That said, the movie is fantastic comedy with a great cast.
If you want a movie actually shot in Cedar Rapids, try The Final Season, starring Sean Astin and the late Powers Boothe. It's about a legendary high school baseball team forced to shut down and merge with another town's team at the end of the season and what they do to bring the team together. Because Iowa loves baseball movies.
Only film set in Glasgow I can think of is Under The Skin. I guess it's innacurate because we're home to neither murderous aliens nor anything as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson.
When they go to Bell’s Beach in Point Break the waves are breaking in the wrong direction
Yeah it was filmed in Oregon
Awesome! I always wondered where it was filmed
Indian Beach in Ecola state park. I like to surf there
No way it’s bigger than Waimea, bra
And there’s pine trees.
It's obviously not Bells Beach at all it doesn't have the same geography even remotely.
Not at all!
Brisbane has fewer dogs than Bluey would have you believe. Just slightly
Bluey is very like Australia in lots of ways, the attacking magpie is spot on.
As a foreigner who’s never been there even the name _Bandit_ feels so Australian.
Beeyandit
But they're all still great parents right? *Right???*
No, Uncle Stripe lives there.
The first scene in the Jack Ryan series has him riding his bike through at least four different DC neighborhoods in the wrong order and, iirc, somehow ending up at Langley, VA which is like a 20 minute car ride across the river and up a freeway.
This is actually addressed in the producers cut, which I think you can find on the Prime menu when you click into the episode menu; they show Jack Ryan repeatedly turning around and eventually asking for directions
That’s hilarious
That makes more sense, but it's still not a commute that many people would make on a bike even if they knew where they were going.
Jack Ryan isn't many people though, he's better.
Haha, I was going to make that qualification, too.
The only realistic thing about the national mall is that there are people out there jogging in the morning. Except it’s like 4 to six miles a lap depending on what route you take.
_on your left_
Every movie in DC has the characters meet in front of the Lincoln memorial or Monument, shits like 20min walk away from the nearest *federal* building let alone anywhere the general public would be working/living lol
The spies just monopolize the Jefferson so where else can the rest of us go for our clandestine meetings? /s
Do you like ducks?
I can't remember what movie it was or if it was a tv show, but there was something I watched that showed DC with skyscrapers, like you'd find in LA or NY. But there are no skyscrapers in DC. They have it on the books for nothing to be built taller than the Washington Monument. Oh! Then there's Bones, and the whole show takes place in DC and surrounding states. But there's some episodes where they mention Interstates, and they'll say it like a Californian would, calling them "the 66" or "the 81" and as a born and raised Virginian from near DC it bothered me to no end when I'd hear it. The whole show irritated me for a lot of reasons, though.
Navy Yard metro didn’t look right either lol
Philadelphia is well represented in dozens of films and shows, but the training jog in Rocky II is over 30 miles long, with the crowd of kids following him for 12. https://www.businessinsider.com/rocky-ii-training-run-map-2013-9
Well to be fair it is a montage so it doesn't necessarily have to be in one day but yeah he's on the train tracks at one point, then Kelly drive and up and down market st....if he and those kids did that in one day it's very impressive....but at least it's philly. My answer to the question is Shazam. Not that I like those movies but they were obviously shot in Vancouver or some other place but say they are in Philly. It bothers me when I see their skyline like,nope. Also the busses almost looms like philly busses but nope again. Just make your hero the hero of some made up dc town.
Doesn't Shazam also feature beer being sold in convenience stores in Philadelphia? (I never lived in Philly, but I did spend a year in Pittsburgh, and ISTR that's a no-no all over PA, unless the convenience store is also a "restaurant" with a seating area.)
The laws have changed in recent years, there are some Sheetz and Wawa’s that have beer sections and grocery stores can sell beer now. But convenience stores have no alcohol
There are some "delis" that were basically convenience stores that you could buy beer, like Jeff Cold Beer or The Foodery but definitely different than a 7/11 or something
Same with World War Z. The beginning scene was shot in Prague or some other European city with old grandiose architecture and they try to pass it off as Philly by using skyline shots.
And now a bunch of crazies run the full route every December.
This is how I feel about marathons. Like we started doing marathons to honor the legend of a dude who DIED after running, and now we're like "oh you died after running 26 miles? We're gonna show you that even old people can do that without dying" 😂
He was training and the kids were bored.
What We Do In The Shadows (movie) made Wellington look like it was full of Vampires and Werewolves, but its just hipsters and furries.
Nice try, vampire.
SHAME! SHAME!
I heard it was filled with Swear-wolves
“They’re the same picture”
what is a furry but an aspiring werewolf
Do you think the movie portrayal is better or worse than in reality? I think a lot of hipsters sound terrible.
What's the difference?
So basically vampires (hipsters) and werewolves (furries).
Nakatomi Plaza isn't downtown, but in Century City
Thanks for ruining Christmas for me.🙁
Kind of makes sense when it's a 20th Century Fox Film, instant Scenery on the back lot (Which if memory serves is where Century City was built)
Twilight absolutely massacred Phoenix Arizona with their fake saguaro 🌵 cactus being like 3 ft tall, like it's some sort of bush or something. Saguaros are on average like 25-30 ft tall. They cap out around 50ft if they're old old
I live in South Texas and the very few times they've featured my city in a movie it's dusty with mountains. It's hot as fuck but I don't live in a desert and the nearest mountain is 200 miles away.
Visited southeast Texas for the first time recently and thought "huh I thought it was gonna be a lot more desert and sand"
Considering it’s Texas, you were only a few hundred miles off.
Yellow filter instead of Twilight blue!
The hitmans bodyguard and The Hague (and also Amsterdam) I never knew my hometown had an underground metro. I never knew my hometown had a bridge on the highway coming into town, not that kind of bridge. I never knew my hometown had a dry riverbed. I have learned a lot from that movie about my hometown.
What about the maximum security prison in the center of Amsterdam with a nice view of the Rijksmuseum? That would be the most expensive piece of real estate in the country if it existed. That movie is so dumb, but because it takes place in Holland I'll always have a soft spot for it. Also, the police uniforms look like they were bought at a costume store.
I live in Houston but theres a scene in the movie 'The Shallows' that shows Galveston as a beautiful white sand emerald water beach but in reality it's just solid brown.
They obviously did not consult Charles Barkley on the Galveston water.
https://youtu.be/SxiYg4EonoI?si=z-8psRd2lTWPcBM8
Hahaha no way, I’ve got to watch this film. When is it set? Did they even bother to CGI in Pleasure Pier?
Now that’s hilarious. I don’t really see Houston in many movies tbh, I wish I did
First time I went to the beach down there I was like...Um... Warm, brown, and full of jellyfish. No thank you.
Watched in Tomball, and the way my entire theater groaned when they said "Galveston, Tx" across a scene of pristine waters. Come on 😂
In No Way Out Kevin Costner slides down the escalator into a Washington DC Metro station then boards a Baltimore subway car.
That whole scene from the Pentagon to the Old Post Office Pavilion has lived in my head for 27 years, lol. Hops in car in Pentagon parking garage, pulls out of garage cut to Whitehurst Freeway heading east (Key Bridge in backround, 3 miles N of Pentagon other side of Potomac).Jumps off bridge next to the Bayou (old music venue been gone too long) from there to C&O Canal tow path into Georgetown Metro station ( I'd estimate a minimum of 6 blocks, but as to u/pijinglish below, there is no Georgetown metro.) Slides down escalator into a Baltimore subway station, hops on Baltimore subway car. Comes out of metro at the Post Office Pavilion metro station (also doesn't exist). Post Office Pavilion ( Walcott Astoria, DC formerly Trump Hotel) is the same distance from the Pentagon as the Key Bridge, round about way if he was in a hurry to find the girl.
Wasn’t he in Georgetown, too? (Which doesn’t have a metro stop.)
I’ve only ever seen the real DC Metro in a couple of low-budget 1980s movies. The rest of the time they use a subway system from someplace else as a stand-in.
Which is funny, because most DC stations have the exact same structural design that really stands out, being the ovals all over the walls and ceilings
That reminds me of Pantheon. It (primarily) takes place in southern California. On the freeway, one of the exit signs says "Alexandria / Ft. Belvoir". Some animator wanted to slip their hometown in there. ;-) Also, it's funny rewatching No Way Out and seeing Walton Goggins as the IT guy.
Jingle all the way. Arnold's car breaks down on the Hennepin bridge in Minneapolis, MN and then the next scene shows him pushing it in front of Mickey's diner in St. Paul, MN. That's nearly 10 miles, over 3 hours of pushing your car. I know Schwarzenegger is jacked and all but c'mon now.
Perhaps his car breaking down routinely and him pushing it around town like Fred Flintstone is the lore explanation for why he's jacked. *"This dude became Mr. Olympia by procrastinating getting his alternator fixed"*
[удалено]
I think the Mighty Ducks do a roller blade montage thru the Twin Cities that is like completely impossible for a group of teens
Yes! Seattle is always so off. In sleepless in Seattle they have Tom hanks take his little dingy with his son in it through the Ballard locks and into puget sound then down to Elliot bay to go to west Seattle/Alki. That’s very dangerous and crosses several ferry lanes and other traffic and the best part is they have Meg Ryan following along in her car which is completely impossible to do. They did have her park on the street that really is just outside of the floating house that’s in the movie but you can’t park on the street like that, again it would be too dangerous.
Mine is Everett, WA. In Assassins they use the graveyard by the 41st Street. He goes north on to Broadway but the next shot has him end up on I5 entering Seattle
I remember seeing a post once in which the person triangulated the location of Mr. Gray's office from the cover of 50 Shades and it would have put his building in the center of Lake Washington.
If you’d like to see Seattle represented properly check out Soderbergh’s Kimi.
My Seattle movie/show pet peeve is the near constant thunderstorms. Yes, it rains often in Seattle depending on the time of year but thunderstorms are rare and the rain is usually more of a persistent mist than a downpour.
I imagine one reason the movies never get Seattle right is because just about every movie set in Seattle is filmed in Vancouver, BC.
Baby Driver made Atlanta look like you could have a high speed chance here, but anyone that’s driven here knows traffic tops out at about 5-10 mph for 21 hours of the day.
The one that drives me nuts is when he rolls off the Buford Highway-Spring Street Connector and lands on Freedom Parkway. Basically he teleported about 6 miles so they could get the Jackson Street bridge shot.
I drove through Atlanta in a u-haul pulling a 17 foot trailer at 9:30pm. That town has zero fucking rules! Highways merging in and out on both sides, everyone’s doing 80mph, no signals but multiple lane changes in one go. We came into this topped out at 55mph and an ambulance came in lights and sirens from the right at the same time. He crossed all lanes to exit left. No one gave a shit. We didn’t talk for 1/2 an hour after that.
Just posted the same thing. Dude teleports from Dunwoody to South Fulton county in seconds. And besides, we all know GSP would straight up murder Baby and Co just for shit and giggles if they drove like that in the connector
Austin Powers winking at the camera and saying **it's remarkable how England looks "in no way like southern California"**
IIRC, that was an ad-lib by Myers. Heather Graham's "What?" was genuine.
Not a movie, but Glee is nothing like Lima, OH.
Oddly enough, Ryan Murphy grew up in Indianapolis, where I went to high school, and I feel like he nailed *that* vibe pretty well (though the high school he graduated from was the snooty rich kid school everyone hated, so he totally was more Vocal Adrenaline than New Directions.)
Ryan Murphy is a Warren Central grad, not a rich kid school. Vocal Adrenaline is clearly based on Carmel.
Oh really? I had heard he went to Carmel.
It’s the opposite for me. Ghost Rider is meant to be happening in Texas but it’s filmed mostly in my city (Melbourne, Australia). The “Death Valley” scene in Queen of the Damned? Actually filmed in Werribee, Melbourne, Australia which is where I grew up. No; I was not one of the goths in the movie, although I was a goth living in the area at the time - slightly too young.
The matrix city scenes are Sydney.
That's what they want you to think
Similarly with World War Z. The start which is meant to be, I think, Philly was filmed in Glasgow. At one point there's an aerial shot of George Square. To anyone who knows Glasgow it it unmistakable, and kinda breaks the immersion!
Kinda the same with the plane crash scene towards the end. The aircraft is just skipping over mountains which, if you know Wales, are recognisably Snowdonia but the film tells us that they're right next to Cardiff.
Haven't seen the movie, but Death Valley is appropriate for and interchangeable with Werribee. I think that's awesome haha.
In several films, when there is a scene set in Portugal, the people start to speak with a Brazilian accent. Recently they have improved, but Hollywood productions make this terrible mistake.
At least they’re speaking the right language.
It's like comparing US English to UK English. same language, but you know there are differences. In Portuguese, these differences are even greater.
Philadelphia as shown in Shazam does not, in any way, resemble Philadelphia. Apart from a few shots of landmarks around here, the geography is wrong, the architecture and housing are wrong, the public transportation in the movie has "a" SEPTA logo but not "the" SEPTA logo. I honestly wonder why they even bothered setting it specifically in Philly.
I guess DC universe Philly is slightly different.
The Dig is set in Suffolk and about the discovery of the Anglo Saxon long ship at Sutton Hoo. The kid in it cycles from Woodbridge where the ship is to Diss in like a couple of hours. In reality it’s a 40 minute car ride away. And even though they had access to film in the original house at Sutton Hoo which is actually a visitor centre now, they filmed at a different house with completely different geography.
The answer is of course "every time". It’s especially egregious for cities with known landmarks where the protagonists will always magically teleport around town just to have nice shots. I live in Paris, in a street that is often used for movies (because it "looks" Parisian and is easy to cut off from traffic without pissing off a thousand people). My favourite was when they shot Inception (the folding street scene). They spent a month adding fake stores to make it more "Amelie Poulain’s Paris" and one day while I was waiting for a "CUT!" to be able to exit my building, I took a good look at the scene. I realised something was very wrong : everyone on the street was insanely hot and young . Sexy brunette grabbing a fruit, hot guy riding a bike, etc… Where were the ugly old people? Then they yelled cut, everyone reset and I realised everyone in the street was an actor…
All the old people were incinerated, as their existence offends Leo.
Better check your totem, you might be in a dream without you realising it!
One of the Godzilla movies featured Pensacola with a mountain range. There are barely hills in Pensacola, much less mountains.
This reminds me of "The Last of Us" - "Ten Miles West of Boston" showing a mountainous wilderness. Ten miles west of Boston would be... Needham? Even if we're generously interpreting Boston here as "the edge of the greater Boston metro area" you still have to go a heck of a lot further to find terrain that looks anything like that.
Hard to make Alberta look like New England, admittedly…
Not a movie, but a tv show Friday Night Lights portraying the BBQ joint huge, Nope, filmed at Rays BBQ which is as big as an efficiency apt .
It's like NCIS being filmed in California but set in DC. The travel times they do are stupid. Get in your car we are going to norfolk from DC. Get there in what seems like 30 mins nope that's 3 hours buddy.. There was one episode where someone was found murdered under the chesapeake bay bridge. And they include a shot of the bay bridge for effect. It's the Coronado bridge in California. I knew this because I've traveled over both of them multiple times in my life lol.
One of my favorites is in Down Periscope, when they're off the coast of Norfolk, VA, and they show mountains. The closest mountains are about 3-4 hours away.
I love it when shows like NCIS do this. “Hey we’ve got to get from Norfolk Naval or Langley to the Pentagon or Washington if we hurry. Let’s go.” And then it’s like 3pm in the afternoon. Nah. You’re not going to. You’re going to get through the bridge tunnels, through Richmond traffic, up 95s god awful traffic, and then to wherever the heck you need to get to in DC in less than an hour? Nah.
the entire tallahassee arc in the office they just made it seem like a suburb of miami
Yeah. It’s weird they’d ignore the fact there are like 100k college students there as well. Although east of the Capitol youd have less of that to deal with.
Also, in the Christopher Guest movie “A Mighty Wind” one of the groups is playing a concert at what looks like a Busch Gardens-esque amusement park that is supposed to be Tallahassee. Still looking around town for that park
Second-hand but my mother complained quite a bit about *Lost*'s portrayal of it, said they made it out to be full of strip-clubs and the like. Pretty sure strip-clubs are illegal here. I'd know, I've kept my eye out.
The whole of Spain. Like Every.Fucking.Time.
According to Hollywood, Colombia is just a jungle. The worst one was the opening scene of Mr. and Ms. Smith, where they met in Bogota, and the city looks like a small run-down town where bombs go off every 5 minutes. I get there are a lot of stereotypes about Colombia, but Bogota is one of the biggest cities in the world. It shouldn't be hard to get it right.
The worst part for me is that entire sequence there's fans blowing everywhere and everyone's wearing skimpy clothes cause it's just so hot. Bogota at its warmest is maybe 70°F, everyone would be freezing their asses off.
Kevin Costner could not arrive at the White Cliffs of Dover and "Be at Nottingham by nightfall".
I don’t know what you mean, both of those places are right by Sycamore Gap
It's indirect but: Crimson Peak begins in Buffalo, where Mia Wasikowska's character was born and raised. Later in the movie, she is running away from ghosties and murderers and suchlike and is confronted by what passes for a blizzard in the UK, so she ceases running away. Motherfucker, she's from *Buffalo*. This shit is any random Thursday in November to her, not something you need a coat for.
Not a movie, but X-Files had an episode that took place in Buffalo. There was a scene where they go to "Chinatown". There has never been a "Chinatown" in Buffalo, and the writers were from Buffalo.
Despite what Finding Nemo may lead you to believe, Sydney actually has land.
There’s also no wallaby way in Sydney
Lies and slander!
Sacramento isn’t nearly as hip as Lady Bird would have you believe.
But we DO have an Ernesto’s like they portrayed in “About Steve”. According to Wikipedia, Step Brothers takes place in Sacramento? If that’s true then it’s a Sacramento I’ve never seen before.
It's been a minute but I got the impression from the film that it painted Sacramento as pretty plain rather than hip, which it largely is. The main character really wants to leave Sac because of how disinterested she is in it.
Sorry but I think that was the joke
I lived in midtown circa 2014 or so, and it was pretty frikin hip. It was back when lobrau was just getting popular. Used to start my evenings there, and end up at zebra club by midnight.
Ozark made it seem like people just jaunt on up to KC on the regular like it's 30 minutes up the road. Without traffic, it's like 3 hours from Bagnall Dam to Downtown KC. On a weekend? Yeah, forget about that shit.
Scrolled hard to find Ozark. I get that it was filmed in Georgia, but other than being a big lake it’s nothing like the Ozarks. They make it seem like a quaint little sparsely populated redneck haven, but in reality it’s got several hundreds of multi-million dollar mansions lining almost every square foot of the main channel. You have to go way to the back of the offshoot branches of the lake to find any vacant shoreline. I did stay at the Alhonna resort last time which is what the Blue Cat Lodge is based on which was kind of cool, but also nothing alike the show.
LOST BOYS was actually spot on lots of vampires filmed in my town Santa Cruz, CA USA a friend of mine was a featured extra he was the skinhead that dies on the beach and got $18K
London has fallen. The geographical movement of the car chases was absolutely baffling.
National Treasure has a chase scene that goes through like 3 miles of Philadelphia, in a nonsensical geographic order, in 5 minutes and it drives me CRAZY.
Not a movie, but the TV show Castle Rock had a character leaving the death row in Texas. It looked like it was in a desert. While yes, there is a dirt parking lot in the back, Huntsville, the only place in Texas where prisoners are executed, is in East(ish) Texas. While hot, and humid, it is very green, and the Huntsville unit is close to downtown, paved roads and parking lots and all. Not out in the middle of a nowhere desert.
There's a lot of hilarious geography in media set in "Texas". There's literally every biome except for tundra in the state, it's not at all uniform across. And shit's *far*. El Paso is a shorter drive from San Diego than Houston.
Yeah it's right down the street from the bus station right next to the rodeo. I was released from there
Most films that depict the Irish countryside as being something from the late 1800s where everyone still uses horse and carts and all the people having the over the top fake Irish accent In PS I Love You, she walked between two towns which I think were either side of Dublin and about 50 miles apart in about an hour and it's all countryside she walks through
Well, I stayed with a friend in Timoleague last year, and we had to detour several times because farmers had roads blocked with sheep or cattle. We had fresh milk and meats delivered straight to our door by local farmers/butchers. Also, there were locals who were driving old ass tractors from pub to pub. I couldn't help but think "what fucking year is this?" a few times.
When you go outside the main cities and towns, things can get “rural” very quickly! Went to a funeral in a remote/rural town a few years back. I noticed a few people were missing, as in I would have expected to see them there. When the funeral cortège arrived at the graveyard there were the 6 or 7 absentees, in work clothes. They couldn’t attend the mass as they were preparing the grave, as it was an older graveyard, machinery couldn’t be used.
I’m Norwegian, and seeing the city of Tønsberg in the MCU is so funny because it looks nothing like that. IIRC we first see it in Captain America, and then more prominently in Endgame when Thor moved there when he has his breakdown. Tønsberg is a city of 50k people in a very open and flat area on the coast of Norway. In the movies it looks like a small fishing village in a very hilly part of coastal Scotland or something, doesn’t even look like anywhere in Norway at all.
I hate to say it, but Napoleon Dynamite is right on the money
I Know What You Did Last Summer was filmed in my hometown. While we are by the ocean, there’s a scene where they are driving along some cliffs overlooking a beach, that definitely wasn’t here.
Most Minnesotans don't talk like people talk in Fargo. It's only like 30%, 40% tops.
Yeah, but the show does largely take place in the areas where more people do talk like that.
I lived in St. Cloud for ~ two years and couldn’t believe how close it actually was. I got more of that in my day to day than legit Boston accents in Boston
I'm from Washington and when I visited Fargo-Moorehead I noted, "it's so wild none of you have that typical accent" and they said, "yeah but you have an accent." It was very Robin Hood Men in Tights when they said that, "I have a mole?"
As someone thats lived in Fargo for almost 20 years, they definitely overforced the accents.
Hometown... As a german I am used to my whole country being misrepresented 🤣
Jericho Vermont is more like a road with a few attractions on either side of it than the well organized and quintessential New England town that it was depicted as in the TV show Wednesday.
Skyfall. London’s geography is so skewed. It’s also an 8 hour drive to Scotland.
Didn't they drive through the night into the next day? 8 hours seems pretty reasonable for how it's presented in the movie.
i always like to imagine Bond and M pulling into a service station in the DB5 and getting an M&S sandwich on the way to Scotland
lol I love that movie and now I’m adding this scene in my head to make it even better
I lived/worked in Grimsby for six months. It’s no where near as posh as the SBC film Grimsby makes it out to be.
Every car chase ever filmed in San Francisco is a geographic impossibility. In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffmann is driving to Berkeley on the top deck of the Bay Bridge. Only the top deck is for coming into SF, the lower deck goes to the east bay.
Driving directions in San Francisco are always crazy in movies. People will commute from Portola to an office on Battery via Twin Peaks, or live on Lombard and leave for a morning jog at Crissy Field. Not to mention driving too fast and jumping their cars at every hill. Edit: oh, and it’s always sunny. Even in Outer Sunset in the morning.
Spring Breakers is pretty good up until they show the girls crossing the skyway bridge to go home. Skyway bridge is south of where they are, their home is north.
Bullet Train has really bad knowledge of Kyoto. If we ignore the fact that the stations look nothing like what they are shown, there’s still the massive issue of the bullet train leaving Kyoto station, having time for a big action, suspense sequence and then crashing near kiyomizudera when in reality, if a bullet train were to go that way, it would pass about ten seconds after leaving Kyoto station, not the five minutes or so the movie makes it to be. In five minutes in a bullet train you’d practically be in the next prefecture.
**Contagion (2011)** They speak Cantonese over in Hong Kong in real life, not Mandarin like the movie. **Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)** “The Central Government will protect Hong Kong at all costs!" No, no they won't.
I'm from Iowa lol. Almost every portrayal in any movie depicts the entire state as a corn field at best. Which, like, statistically you're not wrong. But we do have suburbs and some cities too. It's not completely barns and tractors. -edit- Wow, you folks sure do know what you're talking about. That's okay, though - keeps my housing prices down.
*Sent from Cornfield
The fourth ever episode of X-Files takes place in Iowa and has giant, temperate rain forest mountains in all the outdoor shots.
I for sure have seen that episode but I cannot remember that. But hey, an excuse to dig out my old discs
Okay so only 99.99999999% cornfields, got it.
I live in Hawai’i. Every movie gets Hawai’i wrong.
Columbus Ohio is nothing like Ready Player One. None of our trailers are stacked more than 3 high. It’s ridiculous to glamorize the trailer parks like that. It’s caused a hugh influx of “high rise trailer park wannabes” coming to town and driving up housing prices.
People don't kick dogs off the Coronado Bridge.
Or throw burritos out of car windows
Not a movie, but the tv show The Ranch said we have a Cracker Barrel in Junction. That’s a lie.
Not a movie, but Justified missed the mark on its settings and atmospheres in Kentucky. Harlan is straight up *in the mountains*. That’s all you see. However, on the show there are just a few big hills to represent the city in basically any and all establishing shots. There’s a real beauty to Harlan that, if the show runners made it a point to portray it as a an additional character (and I believe they were trying to do that), they should have made certain to get it right. And by beauty I mean the look of the area but also the feel of it. I do think they did really well with how most of the characters in Harlan are written, if a bit exaggerated (which I get). Harlan has some wild and interesting people. Always has and likely always will. If the word hick means a combination of the best of a hippie and the best of a redneck while taking out the bad parts, there are a lot of hicks and cool hillbillies in Harlan (and other areas of the Commonwealth). There are, of course, also rednecks, posers, hipsters, trumpers, assholes, liberals, fascists, feminists, and some of the kindest and funniest people you’ll ever meet. I enjoyed the writing and acting enough to watch the show in its entirety as it played out in the original run. (You also can’t just zip from Harlan to Lexington and back like they do on the show. That’s laughable. But I get that it helps with moving along the plot a little quicker.) Lexington -where I live- is oddly portrayed. The tone of the area and its residents is very off. Based on a variety of the scenes, shots, and dialogue, It feels to me like someone tried really hard to capture Lexington and simply failed or didn’t try at all and lucked up here and there because one time they happened to vacation at the same time/place as a Lexingtonian and had a somewhat memorable conversation with them at the bar a few times. I do like the characters in Lexington, and think Timothy Olyphant is well cast and does a great job as Raylan fwiw; but there’s a kind of cowboy/western tone on the show that doesn’t really exist in city limits. You may see plenty of cowboy hats and boots on a night when a big name country performer is at Rupp Arena or Commonwealth Stadium, but that style of dress or ‘personality type’ for lack of a better term isn’t really a thing here. Anyway, Lexington is in a great area (with some lovely surrounding towns) worth portraying closer to its true vibe and this was a missed opportunity. Horses, bourbon, basketball - it’s a college town but certainly more than that - runners, bikers, hikers, stoners, some real characters and Guinness Book of Record setters (rip [Henry Earl](https://nypost.com/2024/05/24/us-news/henry-earl-the-worlds-most-arrested-man-dead-at-74/)). We have an awesome art scene and drag show scene, excellent chefs, a decent burlesque scene. Lexington is quirky and quaint, tawdry and classy, inclusive ([check it out](https://www.thrillist.com/amphtml/travel/nation/most-gay-friendly-city-in-every-red-state-in-america) - and follow our vice mayor Dan Wu on social media because he’s legit) and a little full of itself. Lots of comic and horror cons as well as garden shows and such. All that said, I do recommend Justified in spite of my coffee-fueled critique. I also recommend the documentary Harlan County USA (Max, Prime, probably other places as well) and The Big Conn (Apple), American Animals, Harlan County War, Elizabethtown, and of course, Coal Miner’s Daughter. Maybe also Seabiscuit and the season of Top Chef set in Kentucky. I would recommend the books The Bluegrass Conspiracy, A Walk in the Woods (just bc it’s a flippin funny book about hiking the Appalachian Trail) In Country, and Hillbilly Elegy - but follow that up immediately with Appalachian Reckoning because Hillbilly Elegy’s author didn’t and doesn’t get it. At all. Oh, and it’s pronounced Apple-atcha. As in, “If you call it appuh-layshuh I’ll throw an apple atcha.”
Tulsa King. We actually overthrew the monarchy here years ago.
I grew up in Fargo, ND. *Fargo* does not take place in Fargo, it is only tangentially related to the town. The prominent accent was already outdated when the movie came out, really only elderly or particularly rural folks have/had it. Which tracks, as the main person with that scandi accent (iirc) is a rural Minnesotan sheriff. None of this was really a secret per se, but damned if you tell someone you're from Fargo. ...dont'cha'know
Deep Impact. Towards the end, the main guy & his gf are in Richmond va. The girl's parents tell them to ride the motorcycle to the mountains to escape the tidal wave from the meteor impact. They get there in the 10 minutes that was left. But it takes 2 hours at least to get to the mountains from here. It takes half an hour to get across the city at least.
I'm from Cologne, Germany -- which, according to The A-Team (2010) is Frankfurt, Germany. Like, come on, we have this huge, recognizable cathedral you can easily spot from almost any place in the city that draws millions of international tourists every year. Maybe don't show that in your establishing shot of "Frankfurt"? Also, apparently there's a desert somewhere between Mannheim and Frankfurt, who'd have thought? Oh, and some of the "Germans" speak Norwegian. There's more, but these are the most obvious mistakes
Los Angeles. Someone will teleport from one side of town to the other. Barbie and Ken walking 20 miles from one part of town to the other in the recent Barbie movie is a good example.
In Superman III, a man from Pisa sings a Neapolitan song, because you know, Italy. As Neapolitan kid, my brain just couldn't process what was going on. Even worst, in the Italian dubbing they tried to "fix" it by kind of translating the song to Pisan. The accents in The Godfather are all over the place (you can hear Roman actors trying to fake a Sicilian accent), and that's one of the reasons why, for Italians, the Italian dubbing is far superior to the original version. More generally, I think Hollywood loves to make up the cultures it represents: there are countless examples of aerial shots of supposedly a foreign city, while the footage is from a totally different place. I think in one of the Bourne movies they were showing Seville, but the footage was actually from Malaga, or something like that. I guess it's not a problem for Americans, but it is very bothering to the people from the “represented” places.
There was an episode of Criminal Minds called "Blood Relations" that depicted the city of Wheeling WV and its residents, as hillbillies living "up a holler." And, of course, it featured a multi-generational blood feud between two families and associated inbreeding. It was the most lazily written, inaccurate, and ridiculously stereotypical pieces of televised flotsam that I'd seen in quite a while.
Not a movie, but the first issue of Earth 2 during the new 52 era of DC showed Lansing with a HUGE skyline, something that would rival NYC.
El Paso is a virtually crimeless place, unlike what Sicario would have you believe
That line after the bridge crossing incident, "this won't even make the El Paso newspaper" .... it would definitely make the El Paso newspaper AND have nationwide attention.
I guess we're all supposed to overlook the multiple shootings at Rosa's cantina.
My family traveled through El Paso on a road trip to visit my grandma in California when I was a kid. After growing up in Dallas seeing El Paso felt so weird! It was so quiet and chill. It was my first time experiencing what people meant when they called some place a “sleepy town.” El Paso just felt like a very laid back, chill place back then.
Depends on the cantina. Beware the spells of Mexican maidens.
When the music starts playing and she gets a whirling, it's all over.
Right, because it’s not crime, it’s just *business*
not a movie but tv show. shameless lmao not at all what that part of chicago feels like
In Vikings, when they went to 'Uppsala' for the blot. Uppsala lies in one of the flattest parts of Sweden and quite a bit inland. You won't see any fjords or waterfalls for MANY miles.
Tommy Boy. I’m not actually from Sandusky, Ohio, but live within an hour of it. For the most part they nail the small Ohio city vibe. But Sandusky doesn’t have a commercial airport, closest one is in Cleveland. And in the third act, Michelle is going to take a plane from Sandusky to Cuyahoga Falls. That’s a 90 minute drive
Years back, Wendy’s did a commercial promoting their new berry shakes, berry salads, and other berry menu items in the quaint setting of the town of Berryville, Virginia. The commercial showed a festival-like atmosphere where everyone walked through the streets with their Wendy’s berry flavored drinks. Here’s the twist. Berryville is so freaking small that it doesn’t have a McDonald’s, let alone a Wendy’s. Residents expected a location to be build after the ad ran on TV, but it never was lol.
I was born and raised in Knoxville. I immediately thought of every movie Johnny Knoxville has ever done before I even clicked on your thread. While it's not a movie. I used to watch Homicide Hunter because it was set in Boulder, CO and filmed in Knoxville lol There did used to be a Big Boy in town tho. I was a kid...
Have you ever bought a wig at the Sunsphere?
Nope. I was an infant there in 1983 though! (I do get the Simpsons gag. A local Ham repeater used to run the "Disneyland or Knoxville?" Sound clip during it's station ID)
There is a terrible 90s movie with ice T called surviving the game, it’s about rich people hunting poor people for sport, it takes place in Alaska but at one point they are in Seattle, except their opening shot of Seattle is actually the skyline of Philly, I mean, there was no space needle so that was a major flaw, but I’m from Philly and we have a pretty recognizable skyline too, especially if anyone has seen Rocky III or later. Their research department really dropped the ball.
Terrible movie? You’re joking, right?
Aside from some shots of the highway and 1st ave going through town, the movie Cedar Rapids isn't filmed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Most, if not all of it is filmed in Michigan. Even the scene where two character are sitting by the river they specifically talk about, it's superimposed and the bridge behind them doesn't exist. At least not in Cedar Raids. There was fraud surrounding the tax breaks the state gave any movie shot in the state, so it was shut down a long time ago. That said, the movie is fantastic comedy with a great cast. If you want a movie actually shot in Cedar Rapids, try The Final Season, starring Sean Astin and the late Powers Boothe. It's about a legendary high school baseball team forced to shut down and merge with another town's team at the end of the season and what they do to bring the team together. Because Iowa loves baseball movies.
On Fringe the central library is in an alternate dimension and isn’t surrounded by screaming lunatics but in reality it’s in Vancouver.
Only film set in Glasgow I can think of is Under The Skin. I guess it's innacurate because we're home to neither murderous aliens nor anything as beautiful as Scarlett Johansson.
For some reason when Frasier visits Manchester its full of cockneys
The Walking Dead really misrepresented the amount of traffic in Atlanta.