Movies that best highlight a city

[KCMax]

I was watching the movie "Bridesmaids" and I was kinda surprised how many great shots of downtown Milwaukee (where the movie takes place) it had. Great skyline shots, scenes that took place in downtown Milwaukee, Brewers logos in the background. It was a great ad for the city.

Another movie I recall like that was "He's Just Not That Into You" (uh, can you tell which movies my wife drags me to?) which had some great shots of Baltimore and the city was incorporated in some of the plotlines.

I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of "The Lake House" with Sandra Bullock where he wrote that Chicago architecture practically served as a character in the movie.

What other movies prominently feature an American city and use the city in the plot? I'd like to avoid NYC and LA since SO many movies are love letters to those two media capitals. And I'd like to avoid movies that simply take place in a city like that Katie Holmes movie about robbing the Federal Reserve that supposedly took place in Kansas City, but had virtually no shots of the city in the movie (while on the other hand that movie with Brandon Routh - forget the name - but it was an indie movie shot in KC and prominently featured the City Market, downtown and Crown Center in several scenes).

Got any good examples?

[kcmetro]

Fairly obvious one here....but "Singles" really immersed the viewer in Seattle I thought.

"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" showed a lot of Savannah and the people who live there.

[chrizow]

ferris bueller's day off - best chicago movie ever.

[NDTeve]

Cleveland in "Major League."

[bobbyhawks]

Chicago - Blues Brothers, High Fidelity, Ferris Beuller (as mentioned)
Seattle - Sleepless in Seattle (sorry), War Games
San Fran - The Rock, Bullitt, Milk, The Conversation (lots lots more)
Miami - Every drug movie ever
DC - Every spy movie ever
Boston - The Departed, and various other Affleck, Damon, and Wallberg movies
San Diego - Anchor Man, Top Gun?

I'm not thinking of great ones for Denver, Indy, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, but I am only trying to think of movies I have seen and enjoyed. I don't recall if "Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead" had great Denver imagery. Houston is in a lot of movies about space, but it is always just a launch pad and some people in a control room, then worried families at home.

I'm only talking big cities here, but there are quite a few films that heavily involve a specific small town or campus (Breaking Away, Rudy, Social Network, Aspen Extreme... love that one)

[brewcrew1000]

Cleveland in "Major League."

The ballpark parts and spring training shots were actually filmed in Milwaukee

Another Milwaukee Example is the new transformers movie, They showed the Art Musuem a couple of times, it was that guy from Grays Anatomy place of residence

[brewcrew1000]

About Schmidt - Omaha
Dumb and Dumber - Providence
Philadelphia - Philadelphia
Fargo - Twin Cities

[KCMax]

Rocky - Philadelphia
Benjamin Button - New Orleans
Fever Pitch, The Departed, Good Will Hunting - Boston
Zodiac, Chinatown, Basic Instinct - San Francisco
Life or Something Like it - Seattle
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Ocean's Eleven, Honeymoon in Vegas - Las Vegas
The Day After - Kansas City

[brewcrew1000]

Even though it's not a city, i think Winter's Bone depicts the Ozarks/Southern Missouri very well

[phuqueue]

I recently grabbed a relevant book, though I haven't started reading it yet: Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. From just having looked through the table of contents and the foreword, it looks like it mostly deals with New York, London, and Paris, which aren't particularly germane to a thread about American cities that aren't New York, but should be pretty interesting nonetheless.

A bunch of my suggestions (Rocky, Zodiac, Ocean's Eleven, the Rock, etc) have already come up. I also wanted to point out that there are lots of directors who sort of attach themselves to specific cities and so maybe not all of their movies necessarily feature the city especially prominently (although some might), but the city is a significant "character" across their overall body of work -- think Hitchcock with San Francisco, Woody Allen with New York (although this doesn't really count for this thread), and more recently you've got guys like M. Night Shyamalan with Philadelphia (although Philadelphia might appreciate it more if he'd just stop) and Ben Affleck seems to be trying to go that way with Boston, although he's only got two directing credits so far. It'd be cool if KC could produce a prominent director who maintained a strong connection with the city (we only got like two movies out of Robert Altman), although I wonder if the city's really big enough to provide a diversity of shooting locations across several movies.

[bobbyhawks]

Chinatown is set in LA. I almost did the exact same thing, though.

[KCMax]

Director Alexander Payne and his hometown of Omaha (About Schmidt, Election)

[FangKC]

One of the things about Robert Altman's Kansas City is that it really didn't feature much visual imagery of the city in the film. Neither did Mr. & Mrs. Bridge.

Add to the list every Dirty Harry movie featuring San Francisco. I'd also add The Streets of San Francisco TV series. And Hitchcock movies, Vertigo, Family Plot, and The Birds, feature SF in the 1940s and 50s.

I recall a Night Stalker movie, starring Darren McGavin, that featured Seattle in it, and made me want to visit there.

I'd also add The Big Easy, and the HBO TV series, Treme, in New Orleans.

The TV series, Miami Vice, certainly did a lot to make Miami a destination city again.

David Kelley has set several of his TV series in Boston: Harry's Law, Boston Legal, Boston Public, The Practice, and Ally McBeal. Probably more than any city other than NYC and LA used a a backdrop in the storyline, Kelley features a lot of images of Boston on his shows.

I don't know what Albuquerque is doing, but there seems to be a lot of movies and TV series filmed or based there. The Breaking Bad TV series on AMC is set there, as is the In Plain Sight series on the USA Network, and many movies have been filmed there.

I know NYC is supposed to be excluded from this list, but Woody Allen's Manhattan made me want to move there, which I did.

[brewcrew1000]

David Kelley has set several of his TV series in Boston: Harry's Law

Harry's Law is set in Cincinnati in the neighborhood Over-the-Rhine

Even though New York is common, i love how the Cult Classic "The Warriors" depicts the different gangs and neighborhoods of NYC when NY was really gritty and dangerous

[FangKC]

oh, that's right, Harry's Law is set in Cincinnati. My bad.

[FangKC]

I think Kansas City would be an excellent location for a HBO drama series with a historic story.

There is lots of material to mine from the early days of Kansas City in the 1850s-1880s. The early settlement of the city by French fur-traders, the western explorers and guides, and the explosive growth featuring the early bawdy and rough days after founding; the Westward migration; the river boats and brothels; the coming of the railroad;the Civil War era; the stockyards, etc. Because of the Westward migration and trail heads starting here, there were a lot of interesting characters coming through KC that could be written about in any storyline.

The other era is from the 1910s-1940s (Prohibition, jazz, gambling, WWI and II, politics, police corruption, mafia activities, aviation, defense industries); and a lot of famous people lived here during that era: the Trumans, bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, Joyce C. Hall, Senator James Reed and Nell Donnelly-Reed; Walt Disney, actors Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, William Powell, Ruth Warrick, and burlesque dancer and actor Sally Rand, TV writer and producer Paul Henning, artist Thomas Hart Benton Jr., developer J.C. Nichols, Satchel Paige, jazz musicians Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Jay McShann, Big Joe Turner, Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, Julia and George Lee, Walter Page, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young, and Mary Lou Williams, director Robert Altman, Walter Cronkite, FBI director Clarence M. Kelley, and science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. While she didn't live here, burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee did her first strip-tease here in KC.

[Highlander]

Chicago - Blues Brothers, High Fidelity, Ferris Beuller (as mentioned)
San Diego - Anchor Man, Top Gun?

Houston is in a lot of movies about space, but it is always just a launch pad and some people in a control room, then worried families at home.

Top Gun might have featured elements of San Diego but what I took away was the Kansas City poster in the airport bar where Cruise and McGillis meet up at the end.

Houston, bleh. Why show anything but a launch pad and the glee the astronauts have when they get to leave that hellhole for a few days.

[warwickland]

Meet me in St. Louis
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (because it kind of attempts to grab the feel of the Kansas/Missouri/Illinois/I-70->I-55 "axis" that is pretty much my life...1980s St. Louis and Chicago a little bit)
Escape From New York (the movie was filmed here and approximates what I felt St. Louis felt like when I was a kid).
Up in the Air (because almost the whole thing was filmed here)
The Fugitive (1993) A tough, rough, wintry Chicago, of course. Does a lousy job capturing the outstate Illinois landscape, however (that part filmed in Appalachia).
The Informant! (Does a super duper job of capturing Central Illinois/Decatur/Springfield w/ a sprinkling of Chicago and St. Louis).

These are all coincidentally some of my favorite movies, and probably a window into my psyche of sorts.

[rxlexi]

cool idea for a thread - I loved MIL in Bridesmaids too.

A couple more -

Interview with the Vampire - New Orleans and surrounding plantation road
Home Alone - Classy suburban Chicago
Easy Rider - a few unforgettable (to me) scenes in New Orleans cemetaries.
Paris Je T'aime - yeah it's Paris, but the entire movie is a strange series of short love letters to the city; wish there were films like this of other cities. And more films like this, period.
Persepolis - Animated Tehran around the Iranian revolution
A Christmas Story - Cleveland
Zodiac - It's been mentioned, but San Fran was haunting in this film.
Gran Torino, 8 Mile - Detroit
Dark Knight - yeah it's "Gotham" but really it's 100% straight Chicago, a totally unimaginitive rendition of a fantasy city. I mean, it's more Chicago-y than most movies set in Chicago.

[KCMax]

Is "A Christmas Story" set in Cleveland? I always thought it was suburban Chicago, like Gary, IN or something.

Good call on Dark Knight.