'Serenity'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I mostly enjoyed John Wick 2, except that the filmmakers' concepts of NYC geography kept pulling me out of the film.
A co-worker of mine was talking about it today, and specifically mentioned a scene where the characters are clearly in the WTC PATH station, but the loudspeaker announces the next arriving C train.
At one point, the announcement says "Now arriving, Wall Street", when you can see the Grove St. Station PATH signs.
I ignore all of this! It is a fantasy version of NYC where all the trains arrive exactly when they should and the streets don't smell of urine and garbage!
And there are trained assassins EVERYWHERE.
Well, that part's true, you know.
It was the Rector, Canal, Wall trajectory that threw me.
A much smaller audience of complaint, but I've watched Breaking Away in Bloomington, IN and people laugh out loud at some of the geography.
Ditto watching The Graduate with a Bay Area audience when Benjamin drives on the top of the Bay Bridge on his way to Berkeley. (Going east you're on the bottom span of the two tier bridge.)
It can definitely throw you out.
I saw an episode of Supernatural that was supposedly in Saginaw (my mom's home town). Saginaw is lower peninsula urban, and I think they conceived of it as upper peninsula, Marquette suburbs. The area shown was decidedly not eastern MI. If you go out of Saginaw into the countryside you get beet farms, not temperate rain forests. And Saginaw is 46% African American. The extras on that episode, nsm.
Now I'm wondering if there were black extras in "Crossroad Blues."
There was a movie set in Nashville (might've been "Nashville"), filmed in Nashville, that made us all laugh at the fantasy geography. Why do filmmakers do that? What's the point of filming on location if everyone who recognizes the location knows it's the city as drawn by Escher? Might as well film everything in California. Anyone else remember the beautiful mountains of Florida in "Drive" (tv show)? Oh, or "Point Pleasant", set in New Jersey, where the sun was setting over the ocean! Yanks you right out of the story.