May

28

New York City has always been a pretty intimidating rival to Hollywood when it comes to making movies. In terms of sheer volume, of course, no one can come close to the west coast, but in terms of top films made in the country, ones that critics generally accept as the finest of their crop, New York is very much a contender. It’s really rather difficult to compete with New York for anything and come out winning, because there’s something rather sturdy about the people and the artistic traditions here. There are also some fine movies.

It’s not just a great place to make movies, although it has some of the most spectacular locations anyone could ask for. It’s also a great place to see movies, with some of the oldest movies houses in the country, offering plenty of entertainment for anyone staying in a New York hotel and looking for an authentic experience. Years ago, the stories go, people could smoke in the theaters, and one could hop from one to another, and see movies all day. Common rules of decency have changed these things a bit, but it’s still a city that offers a cinema experience that’s important to catch.

The city has enough weight behind it when it comes to film. Some of the most important films have been made in the city, and New York in the movies has been used to such effect that it actually becomes a character. It’s easy to see how this figures into the movies of Woody Allen, Spike Lee, or Martin Scorcese. In many of their films, the subject matter is so quintessentially New York, and the city locations are used with such dexterity, that it comes to life in a remarkable and memorable way.

It wasn’t just this era of the contemporary cinema greats, however, that make New York memorable in movies . It could have started before 1933, but that year, when King Kong was climbing the Empire State Building, the movie became more than a film set in New York. The city became a symbol of culture and civilization, but then it also showed itself to contain a brutal force, one that could compete with the worst that nature could throw at it. In the end, it lies in a poignant balance between the two places, both as urban jungle and high society, and the dialectic serves to spin out films generation after generation.

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