Sunday, February 19, 2012

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

::  Want to take a few minutes and study a picture for all the SF-geek references within it? Sure you do. (It's mostly Star Wars references, but there's other stuff in there, too. I wish you could resolve it even larger....)

::  Roger Ebert reviews the new movie The Vow. This doesn't sound like anything I'd watch unless I'm in my fairly rare mood for whatever the Tearjerker Of The Day happens to be, but this closing paragraph of Ebert's caught my attention:

A footnote. The movie is said to be set in Chicago. It struck me as strange that it has such a large number of second-unit shots of the city: skylines, elevated trains, the Music Box movie theater. Yet the couple itself is rarely seen in them. There is one nice shot of the newlyweds running from the Art Institute across a footbridge into Millennium Park and ending up under the Bean, but otherwise something fishy is going on. Yes, the movie was shot mostly in Toronto. Poor Toronto. Poor Chicago. Poor Paige and Leo. Poor Jeremy, even.

I don't get this, really. I mean, I get why movies would film in Toronto -- it's cheaper to do so. But why go to the trouble of establishing its setting as Chicago with some second-unit stuff? Why not just set the movie in Toronto? Are we that afraid that Americans might say, "Hey, here's a movie we can see...oh wait, no, the movie's set in Toronto, not any good American city. Forget that!"? I just don't get this.

::  I may have linked this before, but if so, well...I'm gonna link it again. Check out NASA's current highest-resolution photos of our entire planet. You can look at both hemispheres. Amazing!

More next week!

1 comment:

Call me Paul said...

I think there's a certain romanticism to many American cities, like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia... You don't see movies set in Toronto for much the same reason you don't see movies set in Jacksonville, or Phoenix.