How I Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother takes one deeply into New York City neighborhoods.  The constant is the bar and the apartment.  The crowded living spaces of NYC are a fixed feature of the show.  The viewer also is constantly in the bar scene and the variety of big city types found there.  Some work spaces for architects and others are also presented.

P.S. I Love You

Great film from 2007 starring Hilary Swank. The geographically intersting segments are in Ireland. Great shots of rural Irealnd near Wicklow National Park, located south of Dublin. The small roads are shown and the rustic life of the rural lands is woderfully displayed. Swnk's character loses her husband before his death he sets the sending of 10 letters to her to lead to recovery. Visiting Ireland with her friends is the result of one of these letters. During that visit the lonely expanse of the Irish countryside is a part of the haunting sensations the film develops. Set adrift on a lake fishing, the housing, the rocky surfaces, all make Ireland what it is to those who dream.

Hairspray

Hairspray is a musical movie based up a 1988 movie by John Waters. The movie is driven by Water’s love of his hometown Baltimore. The show begins with a fantastic song--“Good Morning Baltimore”--as Tracy Turnblat makes her way from her row house to school. In just this opening, we get a glimpse into the urban history of the city. For students used to wide open house lots and fields, the tightness of houses in row house settings will be shocking. The houses are, of course, tight to each other with no front yard. Back yards are also small. The point being that cities were built around keeping people as tight together to minimize the transport cost to work.

The postmodern city is based on spreading out based upon the bus and automobile allowing travel to further spots at a time and financial cost that is still minimal versus incomes. The space of the suburb is allowed by the fact that one can still drive to work in an acceptable time and cost; and have a big lot and space between houses.

Row houses come from the time when walking was the transport form, then the horse cart, and streetcar. Incomes were lower and the time factor meant that one stuck homes as close together as possible to the city center, or later to the bus stops.

While small and tight now, they functioned perfectly in the early 1900s and prior. The house also is small inside and has two or more stories. This maximizes land use.

Many cities have row houses as they reflect a time point in the development of cities and transportation. While Baltimore celebrates its row houses, other cities have very few. In Minneapolis there is one small area in the Cedars-Riverside neighborhood that has some left. Minneapolis would have developed at a different time and redevelopment has tended to eliminate this housing type.

And this is just with the opening scene! The film goes on. The racial divides of the 1950s and 1960s are clear. African-Americans and Whites have “their” parts of town, and do not mix. Even integrated dancing on the TV show [a local version of American Bandstand] is shocking and banned. The kids, of course, prevail and the barriers are broken down through the film. The racism, no doubt, seems extreme and even silly to postmodern children used to an integrated world; but the movie is an accurate reflection of its times. Even having African-Americans and Whites on the same TV show was forbidden ground. What would the audience think and what would the sponsors do? That the detention room in a high school was nearly African only amplifies the message.

But Tracy breaks the barriers and the barriers crash though the film. The film becomes a historic record of the 1960s challenge to the racism of the past. A demonstration is met by a police barricade. Even the suggestion of integration forces parents into extreme actions that now seem ridiculous. But they existed and the film brings this out.

The film also establishes the divisive nature of housing discrimination. There are distinct parts of town where those of each race felt real fear over being in the “wrong” place. It works both ways. Unfortunately an issue that does remain in American society.

Hairspray is a movie that combines some great 50s sounds with history and geography lessons; and it is an entertainment gold mine to boot.

Rent

“I’m a New Yorker. Fear is my life.” These words from an AIDS patient in Rent tell you alone that musical is taking you deep into the depths of New York City life. With all its bright lights and charisma, New York City has an underbelly of degradation, loathing, sorrow, and sin. And, Rent tries to show it all.

Rent is La Boheme with Mimi as a pole dancing, stripper. Rudolpho becomes Roger, a down and out musician with AIDS. The setting is not the classy poverty of Paris, but the streets of New York City’s broken society. Urban New York City is unclean and dirty. It is in such disrepair it clouds the vision and dreams of those who see it. It is a place of row house tenants who ride the infamous subways.

Even songs like “Tango Maureen” bring the frustrations together. The tango is a moody dance of dark tones; sultry, but dominated by remoteness and grey. It is not a dance done with a smile, but rather a hard face stiffened by life and cultural decline

Rent is filled with sex, drugs, bondage, lesbianism, transexualism, AIDS, heroin use, and massive multiculturalism. It is filled with a sense of alienation actually common in Broadway’s biggest hits; from “Old Man River” in Showboat, to “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” in South Pacific, to “America” in West Side Story. If you can’t see the isolation and cold in Le Miserables, you are not watching and listening very well. Broadway’s hits often play to the sense of alienation in American society.

Of course, like the dancing hoods in West Side Story, it does take work to accept drug addicts and outcasts singing and dancing; but like West Side Story, it is worth it. And you get to see the underbelly of the glitter that is New York City.

Men in Trees

Men in Trees does not seem like a show that will last, but while on, it has some wonderful views of Alaska. Some mountains, some streams, some tight indoors. Sort of a Northern Exposure on hormones, it is quirky, but entertaining.

A Prairie Home Companion

A Prairie Home Companion offers a quick look at one of the Midwest’s great sources of humorous stereotypes. Garrison Keillor has been taking us out to the middle of the country where Lutherans roam for more than two decades now, and this film. This film takes a different tack on PHC than a normal show, but one would have to do that unless one was just videotaping a real PHC show.

While one will not see much of the Midwest or Minnesota, one can get that sense of PHC’s take on the values of the Midwest. The reserved nature of the host is pitted against the wild lives of the singers. The homespun values of the quaint old radio show are pitted against the greed-driven values of the company that has bought the station and wants to close the show. Indeed a place is seen through much more than just the physical elements. The values by which life is lived are just as much an element of place as the mountains the trees.

Of course, one element that is real is Mickey’s Diner. This diner is at 36 W. Ninth St. in St. Paul. It was built in 1937-39 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. This unique feature of downtown St. Paul has a clear place in the film as a site for discussion.

In the end, the general consensus has been that a fan of the show will love the movie, while a stranger to the show will wonder what is going on.

The Lake House

The Lake House offers some fantastic views of Chicago and the lake shore to the north. One of those films that you have to buy into a complex change in the nature of time, some may have trouble buying the plot. Two people find love except for the fact that they live in world's two years apart. He lives in 2004 and she in 2006. Through complex messaging via a magic mailbox, they find each other.

The sense of urban Chicago is clearly established against the isolated, unique location of the lake house to the north. It is open and isolated while Chicago is a mass of buildings and people. The house is almost all glass, while Chicago is closed off from the world.

A nice little film with a lot of Chicago buildings to look at.

American Idol V Continues

Now at the poiint of going down to the last 10, Idol has been illustrative of some regional differences with in the US. The most significant of these would be the showing of distinctly rural southerners.

Kellie Pickler is a poor southern girl who acts like she just came out of the backwoods. Even in a stunning black strapless dress she feels uncomfortable. She should have seen it as a Cinderella moment in her life, but it so conflicts with her ruralness, that she is uncomfortable in it, despite how fantastic she looks.

Bucky could not figure out the menus in Los Angeles at one piont. He longed for the simplicity of rural southern fare. He wanted corn, potatos, chicken, etc. He did not understand what he was getting with all the fancy names.

Most of the rest of the group is more urbane than this. These two stand out in their display of a section of the United States.

American Idol V Begins

America Idol has begun its Fifth big season. As it does it shows people from a variety of places, yet it makes those places seem very similar. Whether in Detroit or Chicago [as with the first shows], the performers are the same as they were in other scites in the past. They look alike. They sound alike. A great geographic uniformity is in place.

Growing Up: the old and the new

Hollywood has regularly looked at the angst of growing up. The pain remains the same, but he nature of the growth process changes. In 1959 Gidget grew up by flinging herself into the arms of Moondoggie to the beat of real surfer music and the waves. In 2005, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants takes four sixteen-year olds through that painful blast of real life hitting you in the face with less successful results for the girls.

Plot Basics. Gidget is very young and naive. She stumbles into surfing as a neat thing to do, then falls for Moondoggie. She learns to surf, which is wildly rare for a female in a 1960s beach epic. She is, of course, let know that that is the case.

In Pants, the four leads find that they all fit into one pair of jeans even though no one looking at the four of them would think that a pair like that ever existed. To solve the problem of their sharing the jeans, and then having summer plans in four different places, they agree to share the pants via the mails. These pants put on a lot of air miles. In each case the wearing of the jeans helps the wearer find the meaning of aging and coming of age. In the end the girl who never leaves Bethesda seems to learn the most.

Geography. Gidget takes place on the beaches of Southern California. This was one of the films that brought a generation of teen film goers to envy those lucky surfers awash in beach and water and sun. The beach is only abandoned to one of those perfect 1950’s homes where Dad was puzzled by the aging of his daughter and Mom was aware that she was growing up and facing life. Beaver was not the only place with this kind of home and its impact on a generation.

The beach is one of the most real looking beaches in the movies of the times. While most have a perfectly smooth transition from sand to water, this one has a small wall and once in the water it has weeds. Of course, it has kelp so that Gidget can become entrapped and saved by the remote Moondoggie. This is typical Hollywood as it only rains on television in California when a love affair breaks. The weeds appear only when a rescue is required.

The beach life is very realistic. The surfers actually have lives, and even jobs. The one older guy, played by Cliff Robertson, is obviously there to show the kids the right way toward a better life because he is failing as a “good” beach bum.

The pants travel to both pretty good-looking sites, and the most boring of towns a teen’s mind could dream as a nightmare. The group of four starts at home in Bethesda, Maryland. It is a normal suburban place, but one senses some lower class elements of urban decay. One girl gets stuck in town to discover life, while the others go to Mexico, Greece, and South Carolina. Mexico has the most beautiful stretches of beaches one can imagine. Greece is clearly Santorini, but that may not really stick out to those who do not know what it looks like. Greece is clear, that it is Santorini may take some previous knowledge. South Carolina is a place of suburban life without outside decay, but the inner decay is the stuff of plot.

Of course, Hollywood does shoot in one place and call it another, so one really sees: Ashcroft and Vancouver, BC, Canada; Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; Oia Cyclades and Santorini, Greece.

Of all the spots, Santorini is shown the best. The stark white buildings, hot in the sun, with those light blue roofs and domes make it striking. There is fishing. The people are not that well off in money terms, they shop in old world open markets, and they have old world loves and hatreds. Family is everything.

A classic film and a book cult classic made into a film. Both have some geography worth the rental.

Where the Boys Are [FIlm 1960]

Where the Boys Are [1960] takes four Midwestern college coeds [Paula Prentiss, Delores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, and Connie Francis] through their ”Spring Break” in Ft. Lauderdale with the boys [George Hamilton, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin]. Only poor Melanie [Mimieux] is unsuccessful. The film begins with a characteristic 1960s pushing of the sexual limits [massively tame by 2005 standards] by Delores Hart, takes the group down to Florida for the events of break, and sets them packing in love or disarray. A true classic of the 60s.

The geography begins with a short introduction of Midwestern college settings with deep snow and some with cold. It quickly shifts to the beach and motels. The beach is largely hidden by the crowds of college students lounging there. It does look warm and everyone is having such a good time. Sand plays a major role in that Delores Hart and George Hamilton spark up a relationship by putting question marks in the sand to ask about each other. The larger setting is cultural with the college students clearly letting loose and having fun. The police [admirably lead by the great Chill Wills] are loath to arrest anyone. By 1971 I think that kind of thinking had died.

While the film stands as a classic relic of an earlier time; it is a precursor of its decade. The 1960s are just beginning and change was in the air. The film posits change as a group of 1950s kids looking around for something to rally around, but that would become the mainstream in a couple of years. In the end Delores Hart found and alternative route to the same happiness and peace, of a different worldly nature, when she left Hollywood after this film and became a nun. Interviewed on television recently, she seemed happy. I wonder if she was not happier than most of her crowd?

The Station Agent [Film]

The Station Agent [2003] is a quirky, neat package of a film. A guy working in a toy train store finds the owner dead. He loses his job, but inherits an abandoned train depot in New Jersey along the Susquehanna rail line. Having a place like this is a rail fan’s dream, and he moves in. Suffering from dwarfism, he is constantly ridiculed through the picture, and the depot offers him a place to get away to and be alone. He finds that people pull him into their lives, so his being alone is never realized. A mobile food vendor has his van parked by the station, about which one wonders about his locational-choice skills. A woman mentally harassed by the death of her child almost runs him down on the road with her SUV a few times before she enters his life on a regular basis.

The location for the film is Newfoundland, New Jersey according to Raymond Weschler [http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/pdf/the-station-agent.pdf]. The film did not clearly establish this spot to me. That would place one in the very middle of the most northern part of New Jersey near the New York border. The river in the film would be the Prossaic; and while the railroad line is the New York, Susquehanna, and Western.

The geography is one of rural emptiness. We see some woods, some obvious industrial decay, and rural roads and people. The inhabitants are not sophisticated urbanites, but rural “hicks.” They seem a bit backwards. The landscape is unexpectedly rural. For many this is not what they think of as New Jersey. It is not a place of super highways, but rural roads of a simple blacktop nature. There nearest store is a mile and half away, and looks like what one would expect on a small, remote Minnesota lake way up beyond Bemidji.

In all an interesting film showing that being alone is hard in today’s crammed world. The location information is vague; but clear in its unexpected charms.

Love Story

This 1970 classic divides between cold looking Boston and New York. The story begins at Harvard during the hockey season. The famous outdoors insert scene is of making snow angels and throwing the football in a snow-covered stadium. The jackets are thick and the hats are warming. In New York they fair no better. There is a harshness to it all. The movie ends at a skating rink as Oliver ponders Jenny's death.

Direcotr Arthur Hiller points out in one of the DVD extras that the two snow scenes were shot later. They needed extra footage, so they went back to Boston in the middle of a massive snow storm. Snow angels and snow football were all they could get. Time was money and they were under budget pressure to make a film at a cheap price because the studio lacked faith in it. And out of weather necessity comes two of the memorible scenes in the picture.

Two and a Half Men--Amazing Event

An amazing event for American television took place on February 14, 2005 on the CBS show Two and a Half Men. It rained twice. This is almost unknown in my surveying of place-related information on television, and it started in1973. The context of the events was very typical--the rain was needed by an event in the plot. In this one Charlie Sheen and his brother left the kid standing at school in the rain. They forgot about him. Since they forgot about him after school, it just had to rain to make it worse.

You also have the recent heavy rains and flooding in California making the rain events seem more realistic to viewers.

Two and a Half Men [TV]

Three and a Half Men [CBS]. This show is set in Malibu and provides a neat little lesson in the nature of life on the California beach front. Charlie Sheen plays a songwriter who has his divorcing brother and his son move in with him. It is a satire of California and its lifestyle. Just as Jethro Bodine engaged in every sin California had to offer as the basis for comedy on the Beverly Hillbillies, Two and a Half Men continues the ribbing.

The show is set in a house with a dandy view of the beach and ocean. The snad is used occasionally as a prop. The big element of local life though is the crazy nature of the characters. As with many California shows, the audience would not buy into the craziness if set in most other places. For example, would they buy Rose, a girl from down the beach who is crazy for Charlie, as she constantly lurks around outside trying to snarl Charlie in her life? Would Charlie’s Mom’s egotism make sense in Minneapolis? Well it might, but not to the national television audience.

The show follows Everybody Loves Raymond which is set in New York. Compare the arguing styles of the two shows to see an eastern and a western version of the dysfunctional famiy and how they bicker. The meanness of New York is tempered on the West Coast by alcohol and a sneering smoothness. The lower class nature of New York is placed against the laid back egotism of the Coast. Two comedy gems with a comparison of note.

[Note: it rained in the February 7, 2005 episode. The rare rain forced the guys to consider an ill-fated trip to Los Vegas.]

Monk [TV]

Monk. [USA] Monk is a psychologically challenged detective with OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] in San Francisco. He has a number of quirks that have led to his removal from the police force, but he continues to solve crimes. His crime-solving abilities stem from his deeply felt desire for order. In one episode he witnesses a murder because he just has to get out of his car and straighten the antenna on another car. Order is paramount. The environment of San Francisco is portrayed in great detail. There is no focus on the stereotypic cable cars, here. The show is in the houses, buildings, and neighborhoods. Occasionally they leave town, mostly for rural California.. They did travel to New York City once, but Monk could not take the noise and disorder.

This is a most enjoyable show that uses the environment just as Law and Order uses New York City, but without the addresses of where they are. The show is addictive and you must watch yourself. The true fan begins to straighten ajar papers and pens at meetings. Order becomes a way of life. Others seem to understand.

Also published in Dakota Alliance XV 1.

A Beautiful Mind [Film]

This Golden Globe winning film is geographic in two ways, one major and one minor. In a minor way it shows the academic and larger environments of Princeton University in New Jersey and Harvard/MIT in Boston. The major aspect is that Professor John Hall's work is very geographic in nature. The drive to undertake that work is a major element of the plot. The work deals with the observation of animal and human behavior in groups. Hall analyzes the competitive activities of the life around him searching for pattern. That pattern searching takes over as the drive in the film. Magnificent work.

Billy Elliot [Film]

[Universal, 2000] Durham, England is the setting for this wonderful and under seen film about a British young man's self-realization that he wants to dance rather than box. Billy's father is a coal miner engaged in a long, bitter strike. Billy stumbles into a ballet class on his way to the boxing gym. He discovers the exhilaration and freedom of the dance. It takes him away from his difficult existence in a declining town. His father is angry at his son's interest in a "girl's" activity. In the end his father scabs so that his son can get an audition in London. Only a person with true support for and experience with unions can appreciate what a sacrifice his father makes. Few American kids will get it. If you are that union-experienced father, you will. Many people will underestimate its meaning. The film offers a glimpse of life in declining part of Europe. The poor quality housing, the dinginess of the sky and streets, and the sense of personal decay and entrapment are vivid.

Center Stage [Film]

[Columbia/Tristar 2000] For that person who has lost faith in New York as a place of promise, Center Stage offers the older media New York, the New York of "Lucy" and "Dick Van Dyke." The American Ballet Company at Lincoln Center is the focus for this ballet-oriented film about the attempt of several young dancers to make their dreams come true. Crime is non-existent. You do get a great look at a rarely seen part of the city, the arts backstage. Key elements are diversity, homosexuality, crowds, and landmarks. Take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Have your career decided upon by your performance on that one special night. New York is a tough place, but it still is the top of the world.

Chocolat [Film]

[Miramax, 2000 PG-13] This delightful film offers an enchanting view of the small village of Lansquenet, France in 1959. Juliette Binoche, as Vianne, is marvelous as a chocolaterie who arrives during Lent to tempt and change the people of the village. Her chocolate is a rare special mixture that is tasty and spiritually medicinal. The cinematography is spectacular. The village, the river, and the drive of the wind all create a place of dreams, a place where change is not an ugly word. The nature of life in a conservative French village bites your nose. You will not regret seeing this film. Sit back and let the magic engulf you. [Nominated for Best Picture 2000]