Monthly Archives: December 2011

Ten Best NYC Movies

Posted by on December 5, 2011 No comments

The best New York City-set movies that you’ll find are the ones that give you an honest dose of what Manhattan is really like. Hustle, bustle and thick accents should abound, and the movie’s characters should take you on a virtual tour of their beloved city. If you search for “Best NYC Movies” online, you’ll get a list of classics, like “Raging Bull,” “Rear Window” and “West Side Story.” But the modern movie watcher probably wants to see New York as it is today, not as it was then.

1. Sidewalks of New York

Edward Burns directed, wrote and starred in Sidewalks of New York. Vignettes pull together to create one eternally linking story, ripe with cheating husbands, game-playing daters and one awkward-turned-charming doorman.

2. Serendipity

Kate Beckinsale meets John Cusack one Christmas Eve during a random shopping mishap at Bloomingdale’s. They decide not to exchange names but to leave the future of their relationship up to fate…which never seems to bring them back together. Years later, they both go on a manic search for the other through the streets – and shops – of New York.

3. The Devil Wears Prada

Anne Hathaway takes a job as an office go-to girl for an uber-popular New York magazine. She eventually shapes up and impresses her boss – but not herself.

4. Boiler Room

Giovanni Ribisi trades in running an illegal poker house for working at an illegal stock company.

5. How to Lose a Guy In Ten Days

Kate Hudson tries to scare Matthew McConaughey away by being too clingy and needy while McConaughey tries to get Hudson to fall in love with him.

6. Along Came Polly

Ben Stiller is an uptight newlywed who’s been slighted and Jennifer Aniston is his free spirited gypsy to the rescue.

7. Across the Universe

Set in 1960s Manhattan, “Across the Universe” shows what it was like to be a teenage in the time of peace, love and protests, set to Beatles covers.

8. Unfaithful

Diane Lane starts an affair with a young, handsome foreigner while Richard Gere loses his mind at the thought of his cheating wife. One dramatic scene starts with a good example of what a windy day can be like in the wind tunnel streets of Manhattan.

9. Julie and Julia

Amy Adams takes distraught calls all day long about the fallout of 911 and cooks her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in her tiny NYC kitchen.

10. Vanilla Sky

Tom Cruise lives the high life in a to-die-for Manhattan loft until an accident changes his life – and mind. The empty streets of Times Square aren’t realistic, but they are hauntingly quiet and vibrantly colorful.

The Déjà Visité Phenomenon

Posted by on December 1, 2011 No comments

Our minds can play tricks on us. There’s so much phenomena that’s both indescribable and proved by science – we may not be able to put a steady finger on why we feel the way we do sometimes, but scientists have at least been able to put a name to strange sensations.

Most people are familiar with déjà vu – the sensation that we’ve experienced something before. Familiarity with something, someone or an event that you can’t quite remember in full conjures up an eery, “I’ve been here before but I don’t know when” feeling. Déjà vécu takes déjà vu one step further by giving intense detail to the familiar event. Déjà visité is similar to both phenomena, but it’s much less common.

If you’ve ever traveled to a new place and have inexplicable knowledge of the location, you’ve experienced déjà visité. You may know your way around a new town, but not know why you know it. The difference between déjà visité and déjà vécu is the difference between spatial relationships and temporal phenomena.

However, this doesn’t mean that you had another life in which you lived in the town or landscape. The knowledge could come from something you don’t remember, an occurrence that’s lost in the back of your mind. In the book “Our Old Home, “Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about an experience he had when visiting an old, ruined castle. Unbeknownst to him why, he had complete knowledge of the entire layout of the castle. While this is considered déjà visité, the knowledge came from a poem he’d read years earlier and forgotten. Alexander Pope describes the same castle in accuracy in one of his poems.

Déjà visité means, literally, “already visited.” Similar phenomena include déjà senti, jamais vu and presque vu. When someone experiences déjà senti, they feel that they have already felt something before. A good example of this is having the feeling that you just spoke out loud, when in fact you didn’t say anything. Jamai vu is the opposite of déjà vu – a person is in a familiar situation that they do not recognize. The eeriness that accompanies déjà vu is the same, but the person doesn’t recognize a situation, person or place that they actually are familiar with. This may be a side effect of brain fatigue. Presque vu is also referred to as the “Tip of the Tongue” sensation – a strong feeling of knowing what you want to say accompanies the inability to find the right words.