I was particularly struck by the article, though, because it came just two days after I saw Made of Honor, which opens on Friday and which is set, in part, in New York. And most of the New York scenes were actually shot here, and one howler right in the beginning gets the geography of New York so ridiculously wrong that it manages to miss the sense of being a New Yorker at the same time. (I’m not picking on Made on Honor in particular -- very few movies get the geography right, or the sense of being a New Yorker -- and this doesn’t have any bearing on the larger issue of whether the movie is worth seeing or not.)

See, what happens is that Patrick Dempsey’s Tom hops in his little convertible sportscar on a Sunday morning. (Which no sensible New Yorker would do -- it’s crazy to drive within Manhattan. But he’s a rich guy with a cool sportscar, so we’ll spot him that.) It’s tough to tell which neighborhood he’s departing from -- could be the Upper West Side, could be Soho -- but it doesn’t matter. Because next he’s driving southbound through Times Square, and next he’s pulling into a parking spot on the street near the Stock Exchange.

Now, if he was leaving from the Upper West Side -- roughly the west side of the island of Manhattan above, say 72nd Street -- driving southbound through Times Square, which is in the 40s, then that would indeed put him on track for the Wall Street area (where the Stock Exchange is). But if he’s leaving from Soho, which is just south of where the numbered streets start, but still north of Wall Street, which is close to the southernmost tip of Manhattan, there’s no way in hell a car trip would take him through Times Square. It would be like driving from New York to Chicago via Florida.

So, okay: geographical idiocy. It gets worse. When Tom arrives at his destination near the Stock Exchange, he zips right into a parking spot on the street, directly in front of his destination. Which never, ever happens. If you’re lucky enough that your destination actually has legal on-street parking (and the curb isn’t given over to a bus stop or standing for trucks making deliveries or just forbidden to parked cars for some mysterious unexplained reason), then you’ll be driving around the block for an hour (no exaggeration) waiting for someone to leave. Because choice parking spots are so unusual that any genuine New Yorker arriving at his destination and finding an open parking spot directly in front of it would be immediately suspicious. Why isn’t someone parked there already? What’s wrong with the spot? Am I gonna get a ticket, or worse, a tow? At the very least, a narrowing of the eyes and a quick search for the posted signs delineating the parking rules for the street (assuming the sign hasn’t been knocked down or stolen or whatever) would precede zipping into the spot.

More than likely, though, is that Tom, being a rich guy, wouldn’t hesitate to pull into a parking lot three blocks from where he actually wants to be, and be happy for the privilege of paying 20 bucks (plus tip!) to leave his car there for half an hour.

But wait: It gets worse. This special place that Tom put himself to such hassle and drove possibly the length of Manhattan to get to?

A Starbucks.

Honestly, I laughed out loud when I saw that that's where Tom was heading. Because there are Starbuckses on almost every street in Manhattan. They’re like cockroaches. In some places there’s a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks. Really. And they’ll both always have lines out the door. It’s what we New Yorkers do. We’re walking along the street minding our own business and then it’s like, Hey, I want an iced coffee. That little green sign is like Pavlov’s bell. What we don’t do is drive a good six or seven miles -- which is far, like worlds away, in Manhattan -- from the Upper West Side to Wall Street just to get a coffee. You can’t avoid Starbuckses if you want to -- you certainly don’t need to make a special trip to find one. It would be absurd. It’s certainly not a New York thing to do.

Oh, and after Tom gets his coffee? He drives all the way the hell back uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to meet his friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan). The Met is at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue, which is practically where he started from, if he started on the Upper West Side (it’s just across Central Park). And then he and Hannah head down to Chinatown for dim sum. Chinatown is near Soho, and not all that far from where Tom went to get his superspecial Starbucks coffee. If he was a real New Yorker, he would have called Hannah and said, Look, I’m way the hell down here already and I got this awesome parking space -- why don’t you just meet me at the restaurant? Which she would have agreed was the eminently sensible thing to do, and she would have hopped on the subway and been there in no time.

(Technorati tags: New York City, movie geography, Made of Honor)