Getting Strong Now
September 20, 2013 4:16 PM   Subscribe

 
There's no easy way out...
posted by Artw at 4:20 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


heh.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:29 PM on September 20, 2013


Wow. That's longer than the runway in Fast & Furious 6.
posted by brundlefly at 4:32 PM on September 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


This is like watching Bullitt when you live in San Francisco and understand that they are cutting all over the place to piece together places where Steve McQueen could get the most air.
posted by ambrosia at 4:33 PM on September 20, 2013 [4 favorites]


Sly on the other hand I assume ran all the way to the pharmacist.
posted by srboisvert at 4:33 PM on September 20, 2013


Linked in the article is the documentary Rocky Jumped a Park Bench, which is worth a watch.
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 4:39 PM on September 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


screw the Broad Street run - i wanna do a Rocky Street run!
posted by cristinacristinacristina at 4:39 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


This is like watching Bullitt when you live in San Francisco and understand that they are cutting all over the place to piece together places where Steve McQueen could get the most air.

Not to mention the regenerating hubcaps.
posted by LionIndex at 4:46 PM on September 20, 2013 [8 favorites]


The absolute worst "movie scene vs. reality" has to be Con Air and the incredible Las Vegas Strip crash. I was unaware of the secret highway tunnel in front of the Sahara.
posted by lattiboy at 4:51 PM on September 20, 2013


I'm watching the US version of The Killing at the moment. Oh dear. Best bit so far has been the "Greenlake Mosque" in Ranier Valley. People of course take ferry's back and forth all the time, visiting such locales as the Bainbridge Island Women's Prison.

(See also Grey's Anatomy, where the hospital appears to be at the foot of the Space Needle.)
posted by Artw at 4:57 PM on September 20, 2013


This goes for every show shot in Los Angeles, ever. There's no beach in Beverly Hills, Brandon Walsh!
posted by something something at 4:59 PM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


My "favorite" bit in Transformers 2 is when the heroes walk out the back door of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and into an airplane graveyard in the desert somewhere.
posted by brundlefly at 5:11 PM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


There's no easy way out...

There's no shortcut hoooooooooooome!
posted by jonp72 at 5:12 PM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


My parents tell me that UCLA grads used to watch this otherwise awful film in order to laugh hysterically at all the impossible maneuverings around the campus (kid enters one building on one side of the campus, magically exits entirely different building on the other side...).
posted by thomas j wise at 5:15 PM on September 20, 2013


If you live in Hawaii, you get to appreciate the nonsensical traffic patterns of Hawaii 5-0 every week.

On a different subject, I am currently training for a marathon and would probably leap at the chance to do the "Actual Daily Training Route of Rocky" run.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:42 PM on September 20, 2013


This truly begs for "The Montage Song"

posted by msleann at 5:47 PM on September 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'm still wondering how in the first X-Man movie, whats his name fell into the ocean then washed up on the shore of Lake Ontario, in Burlington. I guess he went against the current up the St. Lawrence?
posted by Canageek at 6:32 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


LionIndex: "Not to mention the regenerating hubcaps."

This was the first continuity error Dad pointed out to me. We saw it on TV in what must have been the early '80s, and he leans over and says, "Count the hubcaps."

I still don't quite forgive you for that, Dad.
posted by Sphinx at 6:32 PM on September 20, 2013


Came to second the nomination for Rocky Jumped a Park Bench, a short film by James "the Angry Video Game Nerd" Rolfe. Nice of them to link it in the article.
posted by ShutterBun at 6:37 PM on September 20, 2013


At the end of Dark Knight Rises, that truck with the bomb spends like fifteen minutes racing at high speed down the same damn two blocks of Smithfield Street in downtown Pittsburgh.
posted by octothorpe at 6:58 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


In The Graduate Dustin Hoffman drives across the Golden Gate Bridge when driving from Los Angeles to Berkeley. There was no indication that he had taken a wrong turn.

My favorite is how seldom the Los Angeles drivers seem to get stuck in traffic.
posted by bukvich at 7:09 PM on September 20, 2013


Oh shit! Open season on the L.A. freeway!
posted by Artw at 7:17 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


21 was a terrible movie, not least because it tried to pass off BU as MIT, which schools are on opposite sides of the Charles River.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:22 PM on September 20, 2013


I guess this sorta nonsense flies because the people who don't know don't know and the people who DO know just goof on it. Win-win.
posted by blue t-shirt at 7:25 PM on September 20, 2013


Yeah, but what if the montage wasn't in chronological order? What's the shortest distance that visits all those points once?
posted by blue_beetle at 7:40 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


At the end of Dark Knight Rises, that truck with the bomb spends like fifteen minutes racing at high speed down the same damn two blocks of Smithfield Street in downtown Pittsburgh.


Bats ends up near the Bonaventure Hotel in The Dark Knight, which by any reckoning is at least 2500 miles from Gotham.
posted by ShutterBun at 7:50 PM on September 20, 2013


What if the kids followed him across the course of several days?
posted by Artw at 7:51 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


My favorite is how seldom the Los Angeles drivers seem to get stuck in traffic.

Schumacher may have ruined the Batman franchise, but he got this one right in Falling Down. D-FENS' route is more or less linear from East L.A. To Venice, and the timing is just about right, assuming a somewhat vigorous pace. Even the stops along the way more or less jive with "could he have gotten here by this time?"

It's a schlep, though, no doubt.
posted by ShutterBun at 7:56 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


this otherwise awful film

I will fight you, bro. I will fight you with a knife.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 7:57 PM on September 20, 2013



"Not to mention the regenerating hubcaps."

This was the first continuity error Dad pointed out to me. We saw it on TV in what must have been the early '80s, and he leans over and says, "Count the hubcaps."


Hubcaps? Who needs hubcaps. How many times does Bullit pass that green VW Beetle (which appears to be going about 12mph)?

Here's a play-by-play.
 
posted by Herodios at 7:57 PM on September 20, 2013


My "favorite" bit in Transformers 2 is when the heroes walk out the back door of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and into an airplane graveyard in the desert somewhere.

It's not in a desert (it's in Maryland) but the Paul E. Garber facility more or less fits the bill for the airplane "graveyard" in Transformers 2. Granted, it's not exactly outside the back door of the Smithsonian, but such a facility (for storing all those extra planes) does exist nearby. No idea where the scenes were actually filmed, though.
posted by ShutterBun at 8:03 PM on September 20, 2013


Transformers 2 - unless Maryland suddenly sprouted mountains and a desert when I wasn't looking, that's not where that scene was filmed. They literally walked out the hanger door of what is clearly the Udvar-Hazy Center outside of DC and are suddenly in the Sonora aircraft graveyard in Arizona. It was such an obvious disconnect of geography - walk into building in northern Virginia, walk out of building in Arizona.
posted by thecjm at 8:10 PM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


Even worse, every alien planet scene in every science fiction show was filmed right here on Earth.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:35 PM on September 20, 2013 [11 favorites]


The Toronto-shot Last Night has its own geographical peculiarities (and indeed, features a running lady who manages to appear all over the city, much like Rocky). It is also nominally set in Toronto as well, so there is little excuse for its baffling geography. If I recall correctly, Sandra Oh's character is desperately trying to get home on foot before the world ends and is not sure she can do it in the few hours left. By happenstance, her starting point was two blocks from my workplace and her destination a few blocks from my house: 4.5 km as the crow flies and a trip I had done in well under an hour many times. She took much longer, possibly because of overshooting the mark and winding up in Weston, ten klicks further on, and the backtracking.

When the filming location and setting do not match, all bets are off. In The Sixth Day, Ahnold steps onto the bottom of an escalator in Pacific Place in Vancouver....


... and steps off the top seconds later in the Toronto Eaton Centre, 3400 km and three time zones away. Of course, in this movie he is trying to break into the headquarters of the evil megacorp and has to get to the 38th floor or something of a five-storey building.

Said building, the main branch of the library, is very photogenic: you might recall it from the pilot of Battlestar Galactica. Boomer and Helo pass through the arcade with a low camera angle to avoid caching the Blenz Coffee and Flying Wedge Pizza. In what may be pure chance, this is also the sane spot where Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama meet for the first time in Caprica, the prequel series. Both scenes, 58 years apart, are set in Caprica City. Same place? Only the fanfic writers know.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:43 PM on September 20, 2013


In The Graduate Dustin Hoffman drives across the Golden Gate Bridge when driving from Los Angeles to Berkeley.

Actually, it's even worse: he's going the wrong direction on the Bay Bridge. Until three weeks ago, if you went from San Francisco to the East Bay on the old Bay Bridge, you drove on the lower deck. So somehow the filmmakers, to get the shot, managed to get the bridge closed and shot Dustin Hoffman going eastbound on the upper deck.

(Now, of course, it's even more academic, since the east span of the bridge has been replaced with side-by-side lanes rather than a stacked deck. When the Big One hits, at least the bridge won't collapse onto itself.)
posted by suelac at 8:48 PM on September 20, 2013


It was such an obvious disconnect of geography - walk into building in northern Virginia, walk out of building in Arizona.

Yeah, didn't they like walk/drive from the Great Pyramids to Petra in a couple of hours, too? Definitely a lot of geography failure there.

Unless...a wizard did it.
posted by ShutterBun at 8:49 PM on September 20, 2013


Even worse, every alien planet scene in every science fiction show was filmed right here on Earth.

Technically not quite. Of course, the marvellous and unthinkable often becomes humdrum a generation later. I have occasionally mused how agog the people writing Star Trek in 1966 would be if a time traveller confided that 35 years later, Star Trek would still be on TV, and its opening credits would contain a brief shot made on another planet. And no one would think that was anything special.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:50 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


On a slightly more mundane scale, it is established on the TV series Rhoda that the title character and her sister Brenda live at 332 East 64th Street. On the "Rhoda's Wedding" episode, on the big day no car is sent for Rhoda and she can't hail a cab. And so, in her wedding dress, she rides the subway up to her parents' home in the Bronx.

The station she enters, though, is the 72nd Street Seventh Avenue line, which is at Broadway and 72nd Street. This would mean that Rhoda ran, in her wedding dress, about two miles across Manhattan, including cutting across Central Park, to catch a Bronx-bound train.

I didn't know New York City when this series was first telecast, so obviously this didn't bother me then. When the show was rebroadcast recently on the WE cable network, I rewound the DVR a couple of times to be sure they didn't say 332 West 64th Street, which would have been a very sketchy address in 1975 to be sure, but at least it's easy walking (or running) distance to 72nd and Broadway.
posted by La Cieca at 11:03 PM on September 20, 2013


My parents tell me that UCLA grads used to watch this otherwise awful film

I'm sorry, what?
I think you might have mispelled "awesome".
posted by madajb at 11:07 PM on September 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


In the first Rocky film the run that ends on the steps of the art museum goes through the Italian market in South Philly. When Rocky runs by Giordano's at 9th and Washington someone throws an orange at him. I know that guy and he insists that he was trying to hit him because the filming was interfering with business. "But I didn't want to hurt him so I threw a softball and he catches it."
posted by three blind mice at 11:37 PM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


All distances were mapped out by using the USA Track and Field distance-measuring tool recommended to me by my friend and Philadelphia magazine managing editor Annie Monjar.
I wonder if it would have been simpler for the author (a runner) to strap on a pedometer and walk the route.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:25 AM on September 21, 2013


That's longer than the runway in Fast & Furious 6.

Seriously. About a quarter of the way through that runway I was like "this is one long-ass fuckin' runway". And then it kept going.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:57 AM on September 21, 2013


This hilariously over the top chase scene from Striking Distance makes no sense geographically in about twenty different ways. Love the leaping police cars though.
posted by octothorpe at 7:54 AM on September 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Seriously. About a quarter of the way through that runway I was like "this is one long-ass fuckin' runway". And then it kept going.

I've seen estimates that put it at ~27 miles.
posted by brundlefly at 12:59 PM on September 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


A bunch of the kids running with Rocky were my classmates. One kid's dad was rich (he owned the 76ers for several years; not so coincidentally another classmate actually played for them at least one season) & got word of the filming through connections so about half the class took the day off to be extras for that scene. I used to be able to pick out a few of them but that was many years ago & I've long forgotten who or where they appeared in the montage.
posted by scalefree at 2:50 PM on September 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


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