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This shows how marketable the movie industry is in Los Angeles. I found it noteworthy how the Foo Chow restaurant boasts about its use as a site in "Rush Hour" with a sign commemorating this accolade, seen in one of the photos I took of the location. The street view of the Foo Chow restaurant shows these same lanterns, as well as many other Chinese decorations found across the street at Chinatown. Outside the restaurant, Chinese lanterns are hung. Unlike the other two sites, the Foo Chow restaurant maintains a similar appearance to how it looks in real life, maintaining the undeniable Chinese culture present in the area. Site 3, the Foo Chow restaurant, located right across the street from Chinatown, further exemplifies the specialization of economies in a city with an apparent Chinese dominated district in the city.
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The movie shot also blocks off the entire street with police and SWAT, which is a completely different environment from this normally bustling location. I actually drove by this site numerous times before finally identifying it amongst its many similar surrounding buildings that were jewelry stores too, as can be seen in the street view. However, in reality, as seen in the street view, the building is actually a huge jewelry retailer, located on the corner of a bustling street that is lined with many other jewelry stores. This is an example of how cities develop internal economies with lots of specialization (jewelry in this case). A fancy Hollywood explosion engulfs the building in smoke and fire in the movie shot. In the movie, this site is used as a ransom house, which the Chinese Triads blow up after SWAT storms in, ultimately corrupting the police operation. Broadway Street, is an iconic building that I know and have seen in other movies, like "Transformers", but looked completely different out of the context of the scene in "Rush Hour". It goes to show that a little decorating of the sites in movies goes a long way, as seen in the differences between the shot used in the movie and the street view and photos I took of the location. However, in real life, as seen in the street view, this site embodies a contemporary style that is seemingly mundane in appearance without all the onset decorations that were used. The movie decorates the Los Angeles Convention Center with a red carpet and traditional Chinese decorations, creating a believable and realistic environment for the Chinese art exhibition. This site was the most shocking realization of how such an iconic landmark can be transformed to match the context of a scene in a movie because it is a place I have passed by numerous times as a student at USC, yet I still had no idea that it was the facility used in "Rush Hour". The first site, the Los Angeles Convention Center, located just down the street from USC, was a site used in the movie for a Chinese art exhibition. Having watched "Rush Hour" countless times as a kid, the differences between the scenes in the movie and the actual sites where these scenes were shot was pretty surprising to me.