Your heart's a mess.

Ben Barnes as The Darkling (SHADOW AND BONE, 2021) “Fine. Make me your villain.”

Arthur Leander in Station Eleven 1x03, Hurricane

THE PARENT TRAP (1998) dir. Nancy Meyers

I love this shot. CONSPICUOUS WATERGATE HOTEL IS CONSPICUOUS right as Captain America is about to get jumped by members of a sinister government conspiracy, after Evil Robert Redford got done telling him his apartment was bugged by the head of the very agency he works for. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

as we approach the decade-versary of Cap 2 let’s just take a moment to remember some of the best and most overloaded-with-implications fictional building placement of all time. the old-boys-club political wheelings and dealings of Georgetown on one side, the defense-contracting-$$$ skyscraper hell of Rosslyn on the other, conspicuous views of the Watergate Hotel, down on the river in a way that pointedly evokes CIA headquarters at Langley, and they would’ve had to raze a national park to build the damn thing on Roosevelt Island in the first place. 1000/10 no notes.

#I moved here after watching catws for the first time but every time I watch it now I notice all of the DC ass things they put in the movie #And all of the things they didn’t use because no one’s gonna let them shut down the roads around L'enfant Plaza to film a car chase #Going to continue to ignore the fact that the highway scene most definitely was not filmed on 695 #But yes the placement of the triskelion was impeccable #catws #never going to forgive agents of shield for filming a metro scene in dc on very obviously NYC metro cars (@4ever-september)

yeah! i am, if anything, more impressed by the location scouting for the sequences they couldn’t film in DC, because [Eliot Spencer voice] it’s a very distinctive cityscape, and they found all these random-ass streets in Cleveland that managed to evoke extremely specific locations in DC despite not being exact lookalikes. just the fact of you sitting there going “hey, that’s not 695!” speaks to how recognizably that big overpass fight is supposed to be taking place around Southeast Freeway, y'know? ditto the fact that i can sit here pedantically going “L'Enfant Plaza? i thought the Nick Fury car chase started around Gallery Place and proceeded through rush-hour artery hell towards the Triskelion before derailing somewhere past Farragut North.” like, the sidewalks may not be wide enough to pass for DC, but goddamn did somebody find a visually-legible dupe for those K Street bus lanes.

(i will, however, affectionately dunk on the script for not even trying to keep up, from Fury’s GPS navigation namechecking streets that blatantly cannot exist to all the self-writing jokes re: “Sitwell called the airports what? that shoulda been our first tipoff he was with the bad guys.” but not nearly as hard as i’ll dunk on Agents of SHIELD for not even fucking trying. among its many other sins.)

anyway, the immediate impetus for digging this post back up again was going on a 70s conspiracy thriller kick before i rewatch CA:TWS next week, and wanting to weep tears of blood at how casually and omnipresently and recognizably All the President’s Men is shot on location all over the DC area. you know, in addition to being a fab movie and an iconic account of the Watergate scandal and one of the peak performances of Robert Redford’s career. highly recommend to anyone tuned into this thread who hasn’t seen it; if i had to pick one conspiracy thriller CA:TWS is in conversation with, it’d actually be the one that’s more-or-less nonfiction.

I absolutely agree, if I didn’t pay attention to the signage in the scenes and didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time walking around when I still lived in DC proper, the Vibes of the locations they scouted for CATWS would be fully enough to convince me that they filmed everything on location in the places they said they were in.

Everyone involved in CATWS Cared about the movie they were making and it’s so obvious.

yeah! i have to wonder if one of the conditions of getting to disrupt traffic to film those scenes was not messing with the real signage, or if, like the script goofs, there was just some variance between departments re: commitment to the bit. because they absolutely messed with signage elsewhere, including putting up fake Metro station pillars (thus giving internet pedants a source to cite for their irrelevant takes on the exact route of the Nick Fury car chase, lol).

but yeah. they cared, and were given room to care by their corporate overlords. Civil War/Infinity War/Endgame sucked, not because the Russos don’t know how to make good movies, but as an inevitable result of the conditions the movies were produced under. both the Russos and Markus & McFeely were very up-front in the CA:TWS commentary track that the reason it’s good is that Marvel Studios gave them their general brief (“we’re doing Winter Soldier; SHIELD is Hydra; here’s what you can and can’t do in a Marvel movie”), signed off on their conspiracy-thriller concept, and then left them the fuck alone to go through a dozen drafts and polish the fuck out of that sucker until every part of it was gleaming like a brainwashed assassin’s metal arm.

(if you - or anyone else following along - would be up for more recs… i actually recommend Citizenfour (2014), a filmed-in-realtime-by-the-journalists-involved documentary on the Snowden NSA leaks, as a companion to All the President’s Men. because the most paranoid parts of CA:TWS are also extensively based on nonfiction, and there’s a striking similarity in the flavors of idealism on display.)

(…likewise, if you have ever looked at CA:TWS and gone “i would watch five entire seasons of this as some techno-dystopian TV show, especially if it had a weird knack for making the audience cry about Caring About People and there were hot dysfunctional ex-assassins who got to be in big gay love and kiss about it onscreen”… may i direct you to Person of Interest (2011-2016), which takes a couple of seasons to pick up steam, but oh boy when it does the similarities are so eerie that at times it resembles a “what if the Insight helicarriers went up” AU)

Oof, I just got hit with nostalgia like a truck.

There was a pretty big crowd that turned up for the scenes they shot in Dupont, but I was one of two entire people who woke up at dark o’clock and got down to the Reflecting Pool early enough in the morning to watch them filming Steve and Sam run laps there.

Still a very treasured memory, especially because I also showed up early to Steve/Bucky shipper hell, and I will never again have an experience like watching the whole fandom pivot on a dime like they did after the movie finally came out.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994) dir. Neil Jordan

GOSSIP GIRL (2007–2012) 4.17 Empire of the Son

Bird girls

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

The Bear (2022 -) I 1.05 Sheridan

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM 2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS 2002 | dir. Peter Jackson

Alexander Skarsgård in THE STAND (2020) E9: The Circle Closes