Movie geography

As pointed out in Carrie Osgood's Associated Press article, Hollywood has many times sacrificed simplicity for the sake of a good story. If you've seen "Little Miss Sunshine" and are from the Southwest, you might notice the path they take is really convoluted. They could have just stayed on I-40 the whole time.

I agree -- my favorite was in Bad Boys 2. The Miami police decide to conduct a commando raid in Havana to catch a bad guy (he wasn't really a boy). When they run into trouble, they make a run for Guantanamo Bay.

That's a minimum ten hour drive, like going from Chicago to Cleveland, but off-road and not stopping for gas. I didn't think about it at the time -- I'm like that with action movies -- but I kicked myself for falling for it after I got out of the theaters.

Oh well. If 30 million Americans can't find the U.S. on the map¹, I doubt it really matters anyway.