{"id":94,"date":"2008-03-06T15:30:58","date_gmt":"2008-03-06T20:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/03\/06\/casino-royale-and-bad-day-at-black-rock\/"},"modified":"2008-03-12T17:16:36","modified_gmt":"2008-03-12T22:16:36","slug":"casino-royale-and-bad-day-at-black-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/03\/06\/casino-royale-and-bad-day-at-black-rock\/","title":{"rendered":"Casino Royale and Bad Day at Black Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Ali and I spent half a day together watching movies. A friend of mine had recommended Casino Royale<\/a><\/strong> — mostly because of the free-running sequence in the beginning — but we just watched the film anyway. As James Bond movies go, I guess it's fine. Maybe I just ran out of interest in such fantastic stories and we were both annoyed at the predictable and annoying plot twists. I also didn't like the impossibly evil and impossibly genius villain — obviously a staple of Bond films, but comically absurd to me now.<\/p>\n

The other film I picked up at The Rochester Public Library<\/a><\/strong> (115 South Ave.<\/a>) on VHS (although they had it on DVD as well from Webster, I think). It was Bad Day at Black Rock<\/a><\/strong> and I discovered it looking for movies made near Burning Man<\/a><\/strong> in Nevada — particularly Gerlach, the Black Rock Desert, and the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation — that were otherwise not about Burning Man.<\/p>\n

The movie is really quite good: a sort of socially-conscious noir-western set shortly after World War II. A stranger appears in the tiny town of Black Rock looking for a man named Komoko. The town descends from being unwelcoming to downright hostile toward him as they try to collectively hide the secret they failed to forget from 4 years prior.<\/p>\n

In most of the establishing shots I was trying to figure out where they were in that part of Nevada, considering seriously where 447 crosses the railroad tracks at Gerlach<\/a>. I thought I'd do more research and stumbled upon the WikiPedia article<\/a> [which outlines the whole plot in detail, FYI]<\/em> but it made no mention of filming anywhere in Nevada — citing only California — and sets the film in the fictional town of Black Rock, Arizona<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Returning to the Internet Movie Database's page, I found that the shooting locations no longer mentioned \"Black Rock, NV\". Returning to the location browser, I checked the nearby Nevada locales and noted the film's sudden absence from the lists. So I think I ended up accidentally watching the movie for the wrong reasons, but in the end, it was a really good film.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, there is a town of Black Rock: in both Arizona<\/a><\/strong>, and Nevada<\/a><\/strong>. There's even one in New York<\/a><\/strong>. None of them look like they're \"towns\", though — more like \"places\" … possibly with black rocks. My old DeLorme map software reports (with map data from 1996) three<\/a> in<\/a> Arizona<\/a> along with one in Nevada<\/a> — none of which are near the ones found by Google. The one in New York<\/a> agrees pretty much right on the spot.<\/p>\n

None of them are even close to The Black Rock Desert, Nevada<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Ali and I spent half a day together watching movies. A friend of mine had recommended Casino Royale — mostly because of the free-running sequence in the beginning — but we just watched the film anyway. As James Bond … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,246,32,21],"tags":[58,482,479,480,2895,478,483,481],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-entries","category-burning-man","category-day-to-day","category-movies","tag-ali","tag-arizona","tag-bad-day-at-black-rock","tag-black-rock-desert","tag-burning-man","tag-casino-royale","tag-delorme","tag-nevada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}