The stars have picked up their Oscars at the 2010 Academy Awards. Best Picture: "The Hurt Locker." Best Actor: Jeff Bridges. Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker," the first woman to receive the award.
Here at Bing Travel, we are silently honoring an unofficial award: Best Film Location. This year, we give the little golden statue to “It’s Complicated,” which shows off beautiful Santa Barbara, Calif., including its posh Montecito residential area, the Santa Barbara County Courthouse and historic El Paseo.
What about the best scenery of all time? In a new slide show, we explore such favorites as the Peter Jackson-directed trilogy “The Lord of the Rings,” which promotes New Zealand better than any travel poster can, “The Sound of Music,” which flaunts Salzburg, Austria, so successfully that fans are still making pilgrimages 40 years later, and “Out of Africa,” which can make most anyone who views it want to hop on a plane to Kenya.
Which movies would you nominate for best film location? Just don’t suggest “Doctor Zhivago.” The scenery’s great, but it was filmed in Finland, Spain and Canada. And “Gone with the Wind”? That Southern epic was filmed mostly in California.
Share your thoughts with other travelers in the comments section.
Hi, I enjoyed the scenery of seventies christian movies like "The ten commandements" with very nice desert landscape.
Looking at that shot from 'out of africa' I notice Meryl Stripe doesn't look much older now than she did 25 years ago, no wonder the Oscars love her!
it is not a mainstream film -- but the I'd nominate the movie Baraka as the film with the best locations for travel. The movie opens with sunrise on the Himalayas, features dancers in Bali -- all stunning.
Laurance of Arabia is considered the best cinematography of all time. The panoramic views are breath-taking. Roman Holiday is my favorite as it is much more intimate.
Almeria Spain... where they filmed 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' amongst many other Spaghetti Westerns. A beautiful landscape as far as the eyes can see and shot wonderfully by Sergio Leone. Really draws you in ...
In Silverado, they filmed all over the beautiful state of New Mexico, where I grew up. I love the opening credits, although I recognize some of the locations, and I know that any cowboy riding through all of those areas is NOT traveling in a straight line.
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Dances with Wolves! best on scene location!
The Firm with Tom Cruise...set in Memphis, Tennessee and great scenes of the downtown cotton exchange, Mud Island, the infamous Mississippi River Bridge, Sterrick Bldg and Riverside Drive areas. The scene where Tom Cruise jumps out of a window and into bales of cotton was filmed in a building where my friend worked three stories above. The girls hung out the window and watched the scenes unfold. Really exciting film.
I agree with "ppurrl" The Kevin Costner film Dances With Wolves goes to the top of my list. It's just a powerful depiction of what the United States plains region was in the late 1880's.
Any film featuring the Bavarian Alps is tops with me. I don't know about the Frank Sinatra film " Where Eagles Dare", but if some of it was filmed in the German, Swiss or Italian Alps, then it's tops with me.
My 4-year-old and I just recently watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and he was excited seeing scenes of the National Mall and some of the monuments. He was very excited seeing the Lincoln Memorial, because that is his favorite.
David Lean was the genius of film location. The scenes of Dingle Peninsula in Ryan's Daughter are authentic and as stunning as the film showed them.
A Great Classic With Everything You Could Ask For...
In "The Making of 'The African Queen,' or How I Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind", Katharine Hepburn described the first day of shooting. Five cars and trucks were needed to take the cast, crew and equipment 3.5 miles from Biondo to the Ruiki river. There, they loaded everything onto boats and sailed another 2.5 miles to the shooting location. Press materials and contemporary articles detailed the perils of shooting on location in Africa, including dysentery, malaria, contaminated drinking water, and several close brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes. Most of the cast and crew were sick for much of the filming. In a February 1952 New York Times article, John Huston said he hired local natives to help the crew, but many would not show up for fear that the filmmakers were cannibals.
Talk about location...My favorite of all times...
I've always been most taken in by the beauty of Ireland, with movies such as the Secret of Roin Inish. I think the movie Far and Away has some of the best combination of Ireland and America Scenery.