I saw The Hunted last night at Union Station, and was pleasantly surprised to find out it’s a (pretty bloody) Portland movie. When this happens, I end up spending the movie scanning the scenery, looking for clues to location. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, like a chase through downtown Portland that hits some pretty well-known landmarks in no logical order (Zero Effect did this too, although the most amusing geographical liberty in that film was the planetarium underneath the parking lot at Crown Point!). Sometimes the scenery looked strikingly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it — like the neighborhood scene that looked like a thousand other Portland residential neighborhoods in spirit if not detail. I kept scanning the corners of the screen for stray street signs . . . Here’s a relevant quote from an Oregonian article:

Fortunately, if the actors don’t grab you, you can luxuriate in the spectacle of our fair city and region in their much-deserved starring roles. Luxuriate in the palpable thickness of the forest air, the crystalline beauty of a snowy Mount Hood (for once, an American location stands in for British Columbia, where so many Hollywood productions go to slash budgets). And hold on for a whiplash chase through downtown Portland that moves helter-skelter from the Fox Tower to the Dekum Building to City Hall to the Riverplace Marina to the Burnside Bridge to Keller Fountain to the Steel Bridge and the Hawthorne Bridge, the latter of which somehow acquired a MAX line. It makes no geographic sense, but it’s fun, and director Friedkin keeps it quick enough that you don’t mind the mix-ups.

And another:

Thanks to the magic of editing, Jones leaps from a cliff in Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. But he lands in water at Washington’s Elwha Dam. Also, Jones looks out a window from what locals know as the Gus J. Solomon U.S. Courthouse at 620 S.W. Main St., spotting Mary’s Club across the street — instead of its real location, 10 blocks away. Then there’s the chase aboard a MAX train racing across the Hawthorne Bridge — where MAX trains don’t run.

This has happened a few other times, especially with Gus Van Sant‘s early films (in which local electronics appliance pitchman Tom Peterson made regular cameos). Or with the lame Madonna thriller Body of Evidence, which I saw while I was a missionary in Florida (shhh, don’t tell anyone). But the most surreal Portland film experience came when I was living in Utah, attending BYU, and I went to see a movie called Mr. Holland’s Opus. I hadn’t heard much of anything about this film, but it sounded OK. Surprise, surprise, it was filmed at my high school (Ulysses S. Grant, inexplicably renamed John F. Kennedy for fictional consumption). Double-take at the opening crane shot zooming in on the front of the school, slack-jawed yokelity as I recognized a couple of my former lockers. (Tom Peterson cameos in this one too, incidentally.) I still can’t watch this without thinking stuff like “That’s the choir room, not the band room . . .”

So I recognized lots of stuff from the movie — but was it any good? Sure. I liked it just fine.