Silly versions of New York on film

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town. Possibly the most popular setting in the world for films, the city that never sleeps offers the full range for celluloid backdrops, from idyllic to bleak, depending on the mood.

With so many New York-based films out there, it’s unsurprising that a fair few end up being a bit on the ridiculous side, much like some of the ludicrous depictions of London. Here are a few choice picks for movie New Yorks that leave us scratching our heads and chuckling in disbelief.

New Year’s Eve (2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gN18nQn9S0
New Year’s Eve is a big soppy mess of a film made purely to cynically cash in on a national holiday. Worse still, it’s pretty much a rip-off of the banal Valentine’s Day, set in Los Angeles, which itself was lazy plagiarism of Love Actually, an equally unrealistic ensemble film set around Christmas based in London. But the truly ludicrous thing about this film? New Year’s Eve in Times Square is infamous for a total lack of toilets, and yet the film fails to show anybody desperately seeking a place to wee.

Crocodile Dundee (1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQrLPtr_ikE
In real life, after flying in from Australia, the TSA would never have allowed Mr Dundee through passport control. Have you seen the knife he’s carrying? This fact alone renders the rest of the film entirely null and void.

Fame (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF4P4Gcwcps
In Fame, kids at a performing arts school spend every conceivable moment figuring out how to break into song. Most famously, there’s a scene where they start dancing amongst, and even on, the busy traffic outside. If this were a realistic depiction of NYC, or indeed any US city, they would have been surrounded by heavily-armed riot cops almost immediately and one or two students would have been arrested for breach of the peace.

Ghostbusters (1984)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DpPicOZOig
Not only is NYC rammed full of ghosts, from public libraries to fancy hotels, but these spirits drive cabs, fry eggs and live in fridges. We’re not saying this isn’t paranormal or spooky, but surely any self-respecting ghoul from 1980s New York would have been dressed in shoulder-padded haute couture with an extremely large hair-sprayed barnet. Also, most people in Ghostbusters don’t seemed that fussed about the ghosts – but perhaps shrugging one’s shoulders is how most New Yorkers really do react at the thought of the afterlife merging with the corporeal plain.

The Hunger (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=888bgz64ihc
David Bowie as a vampire. Need we say more? Well, we will anyway. The Hunger is why kids who liked Twilight think they have to dress like goths. Still, the film isn’t a ridiculous depiction of New York because of how it shows vampires needing to feast on blood to stave away decaying into nothing. That’s all totally true and well documented by scientists. No, it’s because The Hunger makes it seem like everybody loves in NYC loves to chain-smoke.

The Warriors (1979)

https://twitter.com/RedMapleExLT/status/505959362943143936
The Warriors depicts a New York that is peppered with street gangs. What should be a frightening concept becomes laughable due to each gang’s penchant for fancy dress and having a moniker appropriate to their attire. For example, the Baseball Furies wear baseball uniform, including some very fetching stockings and Marilyn-Manson face paint for no apparent reason. It’s scary if you have a fear of sports.

Gremlins 2 (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-GdmYc7RA
The basic premise of thousands of hedonistic narcissists inhabiting a Manhattan skyscraper is hardly an atypical New York scene – it’s the basic situation one confronts when entering any downtown office building, particularly the scene where the gremlins haphazardly imbibe random concoctions from the pharmaceutical department. No, what’s inaccurate is that Gremlins 2 actually makes being stuck in a skyscraper’s elevator look like a lot of fun.

Escape From New York (1981)

https://twitter.com/Burke364John/status/552951414176354306
The ludicrousness of Escape From New York isn’t that it depicts Manhattan as a maximum-security prison island overrun with hellish violence and death at every turn. In fact, it’s that the film was set in 1997 but 1997 was actually much bleaker than the movie depicted. Also, we suppose Isaac Hayes driving a car covered in chandeliers might be seen as a tad unrealistic.
https://twitter.com/redditfunnybot/status/550369242210922496

Home Alone 2 (1992)

Home Alone 2’s plot centres around how two burglars break into a brownstone townhouse and miraculously survive multiple heavy blunt objects to the head, being set on fire and falling from huge heights. This is all fairly typical of the 1990s New York, but what’s ridiculous about Home Alone 2 is the pigeon lady character. She isn’t the eccentric vagrant Kevin assumes she is. She has an Irish accent and is dressed in 19th-century clothing – obviously, she’s the ghost of a long-dead immigrant. If the pigeon lady were an accurate depiction of a living breathing Irish American, not only would she dress in more modern clothing, but she’d have an indistinguishably American accent yet spend every scene reminding other characters that she was Irish.

Gangs of New York (2002)

https://twitter.com/LNCGRN/status/568156523244990464
The setting for Martin Scorsese’s throwback gangster film set in the mid-1800s is Five Points in Lower Manhattan. Most audiences think the film’s bizarre world of constant crime and laughingly surreal characters is a ridiculous depiction, but in fact we’re adding Gangs of New York to this list to highlight that the opposite is true. The film makers made huge efforts to keep everything as accurate as possible. All the disgusting diseases and violence are actually spot on, even the gang names are based on real crews that definitely existed. We would post a clip, but it’s almost wall-to-wall violence and swearing, so you should totally just search Youtube yourselves immediately.

On The Town (1949)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7CIgWZTdgw
On The Town is about three sailors who have just spent months onboard a battleship with only other lonely and frustrated men for company. They come to New York for 24 hours of shore leave and claim they want to spend it visiting famous sights. They even spend several hours traipsing around the place which is conveniently cut down to a high-energy montage. Even the women they finally encounter can barely believe this absurdity. In one memorable scene, Frank Sinatra kills three small children by casually throwing a book off the top of the Empire State Building:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_6KMGB_Pkw
Probably the most accurate film on our list, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles depicts some of the city’s mutants that live in the sewers and fight crime. What seems like a fairly routine documentary of Big Apple life turns into high lunacy when we’re confronted with the terrible accents used by everybody involved – genuine New Yorkers are left baffled about which neighbourhood the titular heroes’ lair is hidden beneath.

Maid in Manhattan (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Opl0E6Vis
Not only does it have an execrable pun for a title, but Maid in Manhattan’s story would never cut the mustard in the real NYC. A maid played by Jennifer Lopez tries on an elegant dress and is mistaken for some high-class socialite by fancy-pants Ralph Fiennes (pronounced “Ralf Finesse”), whereupon he falls head over simpering heels for her.

Essentially, the film is saying you should dress in designer clothes to fool people that you’re more important. Surely, nobody would ever do that in New York…

…Wait. Is that right? It actually seems kinda true. In fact, when we think about it, all the films in this list are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

While we mull this over, we’ll give the final word to Telemundo’s TV mini-series Una Maid en Manhattan. It features the most accurate vision of New York of all because everybody exclusively speaks Spanish.

(Feature: Santos “Grim Santo” Gonzalez)