To come clean, we are opinionated about the travel movies we love. For that matter, we’re opinionated about exotic-locale movies we hate, based just on the preview. But after we posted our snarky “SATC2″ piece, we noticed that the collective girl-movie-bashing may be getting a squinch overheated (we’re looking at you, Lindy West).
Other people have made this point, of course, including the always-brilliant Emily Nussbam and the Guardian. We knew, going in, that “Eat Pray Love” was doing to fit all the stereotypes of a chick flick, and as Jezebel and EW so aptly summarized, “if women like it, it must be stupid.”
So–what did we actually think of the movie, the book, the whole Elizabeth-Gilbert-theme park that is “Eat Pray Love”?
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Tags:Bali·India·Italy·McSweeney's·movies!
#1. Persuasion (1995)
Sense and Sensibility had Emma Thompson and an Oscar, while Pride and Prejudice has Mr. Darcy. Most Jane Austen die-hards have seen the movie version of Mansfield Park and even Emma.
Persuasion, in my experience, causes people to scratch their heads. Persuasion?
The movie has no marquee stars (although Ciarán Hinds has one of [...]
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Tags:Bath, England·England·Jane Austen·United Kingdom
#2. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976)
Whenever I’m in Washington D.C., I walk through the National Mall. It’s expansive and intense, and I always feel something that falls somewhere between nostalgia, pride, and extreme power. It’s the backdrop for so many of America’s stories, both good and bad. And it’s one of the settings in “All [...]
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Tags:Washington D.C.
#3 THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986)
Clearly, Lia and I have a thing for Harrison Ford.
Based on the book by Paul Theroux, “The Mosquito Coast” tells the story of an eccentric patriarch who drags his family to Central America in hopes of creating a Utopian society away from America’s capitalistic grip. Ford plays Allie Fox, who as [...]
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Tags:Harrison Ford·Honduras·Nicaragua
#4. The Fugitive (1993)
Chicago.
The first time I remember ever paying attention to it as something distinct (unlike, say, St. Louis), was when I saw The Fugitive, and Harrison Ford made a phone call from some skyscraper-heavy downtown…that didn’t look like NYC. It looked just as it does in this photo above–which I took a year [...]
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Tags:Carl Sandburg·Chicago·Harrison Ford
5. I Know Where I’m Going! (1945)
Joan Webster could teach Carrie Bradshaw a thing or two about style. She may be headed to the moody, rainy Hebrides, but she’s a girl who wears her leopard pillbox hat–with matching clutch, natch–for an arduous day of trains, boats, and ferries. She’s the “I” in I Know Where [...]
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Tags:Hebrides·Iona·Scotland·United Kingdom
6. Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
Alex lives in East Berlin. It’s 1989. His mom falls into a coma for a few months, and in that time the Berlin Wall falls. Mom wakes up, and because she’s a true believer in Communism, he painstakingly recreates all the aspects of East Berlin that are quickly evaporating in front [...]
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Tags:Berlin·Germany·Los Angeles·Russia
#7. “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004)
“The Motorcycle Diaries” is the film adaptation of Ernesto “Fuser” (Better known as Che) Guevara’s journals that recount his amazing motorcycle South America road trip right before college graduation.
Beginning in Buenos Aires, Che and his buddy Alberto Granado spend months making their way up the continent on their beloved but beat-up [...]
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Tags:Buenos Aires·Che·Chile·motorcycles·Peru·South America·Venezuela
#8. “Marie Antoinette” (2006)
If I could find the modern-day travel-writer equivalent of Sofia Coppola, I’d be ecstatic. She basically took the tried-and-true formula of period pieces and turned it upside down. And not without a serious fight. We need the same for travel.
“Marie Antoinette” garnered more headlines for being booed during the Cannes film festival than [...]
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Tags:France·Marie Antoinette·movies!·Versailles
#9. “Blue Crush” (2002)
To be clear, “Blue Crush” is not a good movie. If you look closely enough, you can distinctly make out a CGI head of Kate Bosworth on some other real surfer-lady body. “Blue Crush” is only good in that good-bad way, like Patrick Swayze movies are good-bad.
“Riding Giants” shows the true story [...]
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Tags:golf courses·Hawaii·Honolulu·Oahu·surf movies
