movies

Any 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 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.

The view Frasier has of the Seattle skyline was completely impossible without rearranging city blocks and moving buildings around the city.

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.

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.

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.

The SciFi channel show "Resident Alien" is supposed to take place in Colorado. It is clearly shot in Canada.

Midsommar got pretty much nothing right. They also decided it should take place in Hälsingland because I guess that sounds cool to Americans.

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.

Stargate SG-1 portraying Colorado Springs as though it's flat terrain with no mountains in the background

There 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)

Fargo is in North Dakota, not Minnesota dammit!

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.

The 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.

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.

Fargo, but I love it anyway.

Portlandia, there are definitely a lot more homeless here and there is certain neighborhoods you don't want to be in at night.

Every single day an actor tries to do a Southern accent but most are cringeworthy to a Southerner. (US)

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.

A-Team the movie is bad in many aspects but what really sticks out for Germans is that while the movie played in Frankfurt (and was shot in Vancouver), they showed aerial shots from Cologne. Which is especially weird because I don't think aerial shots of Frankfurt should be hard to come by (they are used extensively in Arrow for example) and Cologne is probably one of the most recognizable cities in Germany

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.

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".

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.

America is frequently misrepresented as free and the good-guy, so all the time really.

The 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.

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.

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.

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).