NYC Is Glutton For Movie Punishment

If there's one thing the upcoming big budget disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, is good for, it's an examination on how New York is treated in disaster films. The New Yorker's Tad Friend chats with director Roland Emmerich (who also wrote the movie); the piece starts off:

If you’re planning to depict an attack on New York City in a disaster film, you need to bring your A game. For the same reason that deadly-virus movies are usually set in aseptic laboratories or, interchangeably, in the suburbs, radioactive spiders and ants and bees tend to terrorize small towns but stay well clear of the city—our cockroaches would annihilate them. Blobs and zombies? Please.

Please indeed. But the big attack on NYC this summer will either be in the form of heart attacks, when people realize how much the taxi fares are adding up, or Republican swarms, during the convention. NY magazine has a timeline of various kinds of entertainment needing to adapt to a post September 11 world. Check out Yahoo!'s movie preview of The Day After Tomorrow where you can see some photos from the film (like one of the New York Public Library's reading room filled with snow).

And so you can get your disaster freak on, see where you lie in the city's hurricane zones [via our know-it-alls at Gothamist Weather; also see this post and that post]