Actor Roy Scheider died yesterday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, after battling multiple myeloma for several years and suffering complications from a staph infection. He was 75 and had been living in Sag Harbor, New York (after moving out his house in Sagaponack that Billy Joel purchased). more ›

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Last week, retired NYPD detective Robert Volpe died at age 63 in Staten Island. He was not any ordinary detective: Volpe specialized in art thefts and frauds, tracking down paintings by Matisse and Raphael, Greek sculptures, and Tiffany glass, all while continuing to paint, teach and lecture about art. The NY Times had a vivid obituary of Volpe's life - it sounds just like a movie:

Mr. Volpe essentially created his detective’s job after computer analyses pinpointed art theft as a growing problem. Asked to make a survey, he came back with actual arrests instead of a report — underlining the need for a special effort. more ›

A look at some noteworthy programs this week: more ›

SummerScreen (you know, like sunscreen) is The L Magazine's addition to the already successful summer of McCarren Park Pool events. more ›

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After all the comments on yesterday's post about books set in NYC, we got to thinking, has anyone bothered to come up with a list of all the movies set in the city? The answer, of course, is yes-- at Wikipedia, of course. What an amazing site-- it's like having a genie who's only job is to distract us with useless NYC trivia! They've probably missed a couple of movies here and there, but the list looks fairly comprehensive. Absolute, undisputable fact: the 1970s was far and away the most interesting time for NYC movies-- check these out: more ›

Peter Parker, please. Gothamist can understand artistic license. We can understands leaps of faith necessary to forward a movie plot. But we cannot sit and not comment on the subway problem in Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man 2 is clearly set in New York City: Peter Parker goes to Columbia University, Aunt May lives in Queens... which is why it killed us to see Spider-Man and Doc Ock fight on top of a subway (an R train it seems, from the Bay Ridge sign) that was running amidst city skyscrapers. As anyone, native New Yorker or first-time visitor knows, there are no subways that run aboveground in midtown Manhattan amongst tall buildings. Therefore, this subway could only be the El in Chicago. But not content to keep the subway in Chicago, the train suddenly is in Queens or Brooklyn, with taxi cabs and traffic underneath the elevated tracks, and then is back in Chicago as the action moves back to the roof of the subway car. It was so confusing to Gothamist that it hurt our head. And now, this idea that there are elevated trains running through midtown is being perpetuated with the movie's monster box office! We would expect this of some hack job from Roland Emmerich, but not "classy" production like Spider-Man 2. What kind of fools do you think we are? Oh, wait... more ›

Some movies that capture New York in the 70s: Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Shaft, Mean Streets, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection. Episode 7 of New York: A Documentary Film focuses on New York from 1945 to today. more ›

The best cop movie Gothamist has seen this year, Infernal Affairs, has been chosen as Hong Kong's official selection for Best Foreign Film consideration for the 2003 Academy Awards (meaning, the Academy Awards that will honor films from 2003, but will be broadcast in 2004). The premise is simple and complicated, as the plot description from IMDB indicates: It's surprisingly sophisticated, given it is from Hong Kong (but that doesn't mean there aren't lapses into cheesy interludes when women are around). Truly, the four main performances, of the undercover, his supervisor, the mole, his mob boss, are what drive the film. And Brad Pitt bought the remake rights to the film, but Gothamist doesn't know what that means. more ›