BlazeWhen did a movie misrepresent the country or city you live in?
First example is probably going to be Emily in Paris, it’s a running gag on French media how distorted the image of the city is in that show.
KallioapinaThe finnish youth movie Pitkä Kuuma Kesä, set in 1980’s Joensuu, really portrays the cops in far too positive light. They werent as jovial and unviolent as in the movie - they employed their rubber batongs much more freely irl. I know from experience.
They are luckily far less violent and authoritarian in current times, per my own experience and being told by my friends.
ramble81There was this show called “Night Shift” that was supposed to be set in San Antonio… complete with mountains in the background. (It was filmed in Albuquerque and San Antonio has no mountains near it)
SSTFAny movie that depicts the pyramids of Giza as being in the middle of pristine deep desert is kind of funny. I mean, when you look up pictures online they are always angled to give the impression. It adds mystique to think the pyramids are at least a little difficult to reach. The reality is that the city of Cairo goes basically right up to them. You can take a taxi from the city and get within American walking distance.
The pyramids are of course flooded with tourists, so any daring adventurer would in reality have to push their way past a family of six from Iowa to get to the hidden chamber of the pyramid.
Thank you for posting this. Reminds of pictures taken from a fast-food chain (don’t remember which one) where you can see the pyramids through the window
That’s the one!
This picture pisses me off Everytime I see it because they didn’t line up the Pizza Hut logo to give the pyramid a hat.
American walking distance
How could you do this
While I no longer live there, the movie Cooties has the characters drive through my home town after a zombie outbreak. The street they used is very clearly from an icy nicer town or backlot set in Hollywood. They did however insult the place as they drove through it, and I can’t say they didn’t mail that part.
TheReturnOfPEBThe view Frasier has of the Seattle skyline was completely impossible without rearranging city blocks and moving buildings around the city.
Are you suggesting the show was all some sort of extended Twilight Zone bit where Fraiser had the consciousnesses of everyone else trapped inside of a world where he was essentially a god, and forced them to play out petty interactions, never letting the facade slip lest they incur his wrath?
Is Maris a living example of what happens when Fraiser is angered to the point of punishment? Is that why we never see her? Is her visage as a being that has no mouth but must scream so horrific that it must be hidden from the viewing audience at all costs?
Che BananaPlus, one of them pronounced Lake Chelan like She-lawn, not, She-laan…and that just ruined it for me.
They always show India incorrectly, way more colourful and cleaner than it is. I think mostly not shot here too. Especially in older movies. Also the people speak English in an accent that only Indians abroad speak in.
Also the people speak English in an accent that only Indians abroad speak in.
Curious about this, is the local accent very different?
Destroyer of Worlds 3000The SciFi channel show “Resident Alien” is supposed to take place in Colorado. It is clearly shot in Canada.
A lot of movies do a good job of showing Vancouver, because that’s where a lot of them are filmed.
Recreational PlacebosFargo, but I love it anyway.
Fargo is in North Dakota, not Minnesota dammit!
“Moorhead” just doesn’t ring the same, and would fit a different genre better.
When I lived in San Francisco, I watched a movie in theater and an SF scene appeared. The audience cheered just from seeing the golden gate Bridge. The geography of the areas around the bridge are what get misrepresented the most, since most media slaps the bridge in the background.
Every single day an actor tries to do a Southern accent but most are cringeworthy to a Southerner.
That’s ok, all of your accents are cringeworthy to the rest of us. Automatically knocks 30 points off someone’s IQ.
Really living up to that username.
Why bless your heart!
Portlandia, there are definitely a lot more homeless here and there is certain neighborhoods you don’t want to be in at night.
Portland has changed quite a bit since that show premiered.
Stargate SG-1 portraying Colorado Springs as though it’s flat terrain with no mountains in the background
Brazil is always misrepresented everywhere, but two funny cases come to mind:
There was a House episode where Dr. House was treating a CIA officer who had been to Bolivia and had eaten a lot of nuts. At the end of the episode House realized the officer has actually been to Brazil and not Bolivia and then figures out that he ate Brazil Nuts, which could cause all the symptoms he had. In reality Brazil Nuts are much more common in Bolivia than they are in Brazil (or anywhere else).
The other case was Westworld, Vincent Cassel speaks perfect Portuguese while playing an American character, talking to a Brazilian character whose actor speaks it incorrectly and with an extremely loaded accent.
Fast and Furious 5 comes to mind, with the awful portuguese and the stupid american desert that’s apparently around Rio de Janeiro.
Ah yes, notoriously arid Rio.
Did they throw a yellow filter in the camera, too?
Midsommar got pretty much nothing right. They also decided it should take place in Hälsingland because I guess that sounds cool to Americans.
In the first season of peaky blinders. Whenever they spoke the Romani, they actually spoke really broken Romanian. They fixed it later on, but still.
There’s an EP of South Park with some Romanian gymnast kids that didn’t make much sense, they probably just picked a little known eastern european country at random for the joke and that was it. Then recently they made a parody of Andrew Tate and said he was romanian. That was a bit sad as well :p
Beyond that just references to Romania and Transylvania whenever there’s a vampire or werewolf or whatever. Even Ron Weasley has a brother that studies dragons there, iirc. But those are amusing and fairly cool references so whatever.
UKFilmNerdThe only one that comes to mind is a film called The 51st State starring Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle.
There was a group of us at a job many, many years ago performing a survey of Liverpool. One night in the hotel, Channel 4 broadcast the film, which is set in the city. The following morning, two of the guys who had been surveying all the backstreets and alleyways commented that the chase in the film made no sense to them. This was because they could see the cars were jumping to different spots in the city, and it wasn’t coherent.
But I guess you could make that comment about a lot of car chases in the movies.
The 51st State
Der Superchemiker Elmo McElroy entwickelt eine neue Droge, die aus 100% legalen Inhaltsstoffen besteht, er will damit mal so richtig absahnen. Dieses Produkt mit dem Namen POS 51 ist von sämtlichen Drogenbossen sehr begehrt, aber schon nach kurzer Zeit läuft alles anders als man denkt. Denn als der Deal anscheinend in USA mit The Lizard geplatzt ist, versucht er es in England wo schon der nächste Kunde für Elmo McElroy wartet...
ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝I just mentioned 51st State - twinsies.
Jesus Emp! I’m gonna have to start my own server, give me some room man! 🤣
You can try but I fear we are in an It Follows situation here. Not sure which of us is it though.
Criminal minds when they did an episode in Milwaukee. I was okay that the sets looked nothing like Milwaukee, but I couldn’t handle it when they showed b roll of another city. I get not building city specific sets or shooting on location, but not even buying the stock footage of Milwaukee was so lazy I had to stop watching the show.
They faked the canning district? This is My Milwaukee
This Is My Milwaukee
Uploading to my own account for a joke.All credit goes to Synydyne at http://thisismymilwaukee.com/, they produced this, not me.
I went to college in Muncie, Indiana, which is the inspiration for Pawnee in Parks and Recreation.
Muncie is kinda like Pawnee, I guess. But without the whimsy.
Do you meant David Letterman at Ball State?
How do people drink from the water bubblers
The instant I read “Muncie” I was expecting to find out that everything I knew about it from The Hudsucker Proxy was false, so thank you for preserving my innocence
GOOOOOOOO EAGLES
The Hostel showed Bratislava and Slovakia as a post-communist hellscape. It was very much overblown and not filmed here at all.
Funily enough some cat chase scene for whatever action film was filmed here while the chase was supposed to be in Vienna (I think).
What about Bratislava in Eurotrip? I was like a few coins they had was worth all the money in the country pretty much.
In Supernatural they went to Longmont Colorado, and it was in the middle of lush (obviously Canadian) forest. There is no forest anywhere really near Longmont. It would’ve been more accurate had they shot that shit in LA.
British Columbia’s forests make up like 90% of the forests on TV I swear. Gorgeous though.
According to Stargate, every planet is a desert or Vancouver.
I was going to to say Sioux Falls, SD in Supernatural being basically a bar and junkyard where exeryone knows each other. It’s a town of 200,000 people.
I went to the Museum of Liverpool today and they have a big section on the city in film and TV and it has appeared in a lot more than media than you’d think but largely standing in for elsewhere.
When it is featured as itself, the depictions are usually pretty accurate because they’ve been written by locals. I suppose the worst example is 51st State but that is over-the-top and so everything is rather cartoonish - my brother’s friend was an extra in that gang of punks but was largely left on the cutting floor.
Wondrous Place gallery
Celebrating the city’s staggering roll call of trailblazing entertainers, musicians, sports people, writers, poets, visual artists and comedians, the gallery continues to showcase Liverpool’s internationally recognised creative expression and influence through exciting new displays and immersive experiences.
1940s New York for a chemically enhanced all American soldier, get yourself down to Liverpool docks. 😁
Yes, that is one of the more high profile example, along with places like St George’s Hall standing in for Gotham in Batman. First Avenger was filmed in the Stanley Dock area and the adjacent dock road - apart from the big “Brooklyn” sign it’s actually pretty unaltered as there’s some interesting buildings down there (not sure if the hexagonal clock gets screentime you see the box bridge, the main dock walls, etc). There’s even a nice family connection as my grandfather (who would go on to be a gateman on the dry dock further down the road) learned to swim in the Bramley Docks which are the next ones along.
That’s lovely. You’ve reminded me, I live near Tilbury Docks which they passed off as Venice for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Just along the road from there is the Tilbury Fort which was turned into the Tibetan prison for Batman Begins.
Stuffs everywhere!
They are some great examples because most local people don’t give it a second thought but some location scout saw that and went "well there’s our Tibetan prison.
Liverpool has done well as a location because we were rather ignored for decades so the Victorian dock complex was left untouched, where, elsewhere, they’d have just been demolished and some soulless glass and concrete apartment blocks would have been built all over it.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆I haven’t seen one for my city yet. They’ve pretty much called it out as the shithole it is the few times I have seen my city mentioned by name in some popular media.
I’m American so I could list so many movies from Hollywood (ie made by my own country) that misrepresent this country. Just pick anything at random, really. They all make it look better than it is, even when showing off what sucks.
America is frequently misrepresented as free and the good-guy, so all the time really.
Pensacola in Godzilla. LOL, no. It’s nowhere neat that large and lit up. They made it look like a major port city. Well, it’s a port city all right.
Vikings portrayal of Uppsala is absolutely laughable, in the show it’s portrayed as this väst landscape with mountains and waterfalls. Uppsala is almost completely flat, it’s sometimes referred to as “The Uppsala flats”.