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John Beifuss
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Published 9:00 AM EDT Jun 9, 2020
Filmmakers: If you want your movie to earn rave reviews, remember that “the USA’s best city for filming is Memphis.”
That’s the rather dubious conclusion of an analysis of 939 filming locations recently conducted by Sovereign Luxury Travel, a British company that organizes “bespoke luxury holidays to handpicked hotels,” according to its website.
“Memphis tops our ranking of US cities as the best filming location,” Sovereign reported last week in an article on its website.
This determination was based on the “Metascores” of movies shot here, as compiled by Metacritic, a website that aggregates the work of professional movie reviewers, assigning each review a percentage grade, as if it were a school test.
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According to Sovereign, movies shot in Memphis had an average Metascore of 63.1, making it the “top” city in the U.S.
However, the three best-reviewed so-called Memphis movies make an unusual trio.
The top-rated film is Monte Hellman’s cross-country road-trip masterpiece “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971), which includes a race-track scene filmed at the now abandoned Lakeland International Raceway, east of Memphis on U.S. 64. “Blacktop,” which has a Metascore of 89, is not exactly a “Memphis” movie, even if we are happy to claim it.
The No. 2 movie is director Jake Mahaffy’s “Free In Deed” (Metascore: 81), a harrowing 2015 independent film about a desperate Pentecostal minister (David Harewood). Memphis to its scraped-raw bone, the movie received almost no theatrical distribution, and was produced on a budget that might not pay for one of those “bespoke” holidays.
The No. 3 Memphis movie is Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 “Mystery Train,” another atmospheric and economical indie, but one that made an immediate international impact and remains arguably the essential Memphis movie.
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Other Memphis movies cited by Sovereign include — in descending order of Meta-praise — “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Mississippi Grind,” “Forty Shades of Blue,” “Cast Away,” “Walk the Line,” “The Rainmaker” and “A Face in the Crowd.”
In comparison, the city ranked second by Sovereign is Houston, home to such auteurist milestones as Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” a 2015 nominee for Best Picture; Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” (1998); and Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011). No. 3 is Jersey City, credited with “The Godfather,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Funny Girl.”
Sovereign used the “filming locations” category on the Internet Movie Database to determine movie cities, and analyzed only movies with a Metacritic score. Memphis benefited because relatively few movies have been shot here; in comparison, Los Angeles is home to hundreds and hundreds of titles — misfires as well as masterpieces.
Meanwhile, Sovereign named South Korea as the top “Global Filming Location,” thanks to such movies as “Black Panther” (2018), “Burning” (2018) and this year’s Best Picture Oscar-winner, “Parasite.” New Jersey was the top state, while Tennessee ranked ninth, with its top three Metascorers being Robert Altman’s 1975 “Nashville”; “Two-Lane Blacktop”; and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980).
Citing New Zealand as a top travel destination for fans of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the Sovereign survey is intended to encourage international movie tourism. The full survey can be found at sovereign.com/worlds-best-filming-locations/.
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