Geography problem

Before I say anything further, a disclaimer: I know, it is a fairy tale/romantic comedy cross-genre mashup. And it was delightful and inventive and creative and sly (we were counting all the Disney animated tropes and the films they were in at the beginning -- e.g., bluebirds circling Giselle as they do in "Song of the South", anthropomorphic forest animals out of "Bambi", the animals working in concert to dress the heroine and clean the apartment, as in "Cinderella", the ballroom dance in "Beauty and the Beast", the poisoned apple and the old hag from "Snow White...", and delightfully on and on.) The Mencken-Schwarz songs were terrific, as were the dance numbers -- I imagine people growing up watching this film will be somewhat disappointed when, as adults, they come to New York and find Central Park - while and urban treasure -- is not quite so dazzling. So you see, I really liked this.

But, as a New Yorker watching a film shot in my hometown (and I'm sure this holds true for anyone whose home turf is the setting of a film; it's just that NY is so often the setting) I am always disturbed when a film gets the geography wrong. I know this is picky, and I don't look for it on purpose. I just can't help but notice it. (And, when I comment on it to my wife, she hates it!) But here is what took me out of the story in the first live-action section, from Giselle's arrival in New York until she is taken in the cab in the rain. She emerges from a manhole in the middle of Times Square (about 44th Street in a Manhattan with a very regular street grid). She manages to get on the subway and gets off -- one can see the name of the station -- on the Bowery. The street is the equivalent of minus 8th street (the grid starts on Houston Street and are numbered going north from there; Bowery is the name of Third Avenue south of Houston, hence I call those streets, in reality all named, but for clarity here with negative numbers heading south. In other words, she is now about fifty blocks south of where she started. So far, so good. Robert and Morgan drive by in a cab and see Giselle in trouble. They are headed home to their apartment, which, we learn, is on the other (west) side at about 116th Street. (I cannot recall the exact number, but it is mentioned. This is the area near Columbia University.) We learn in the following sequence that Robert's office is in Columbus Circle, which is at 8th Avenue and 59th Street. In other words, and here is where my annoying critical viewing came into play, they had the cab drive almost seventy streets and five avenue blocks in the exact wrong direction on their way home! Thinking about it later I tried to justify it by thinking maybe Robert first had to go all the down and across town to pick up Morgan at school. But having her in a school that far from home is unlikely, and the fancy private schools in Manhattan are nowhere near that area. You can see why I got little sleep after seeing this film!

On a less trivial and more important matter, though, also related to New York, was the representation of the "mean streets" that early sequence shows. Portraying New York that way made sense, sad to say, in the seventies through early nineties ("Taxi Driver", "The Warriors", "Summer of Sam", for some examples. But by the 2000's the version we saw in "Sex and the City", while a fantasy on so many levels, shows New York as a safe and relatively clean place. We hope he change is permanent, and that the stereotype fades in Hollywood films as it has in reality.