you like ethnic food.
My wife and I got together cruising the seemingly bland strip malls of the San Gabriel Valley in the early 90s.
Goddamn that was tasty!
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That’s true, you can find some great food in between the laundromats and donut shops!
They did one on the tv show Alcatraz a few years ago. Here’s a side by side.
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Wow! Steve McQueen sure has gotten prettier in his old age.
I’m glad they brought back the green Bug, too. Can’t do that chase without the green VW (although you’re supposed to see it like six times).
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Lol I remember watching this on tv and it being a pretty good homage to the original.
The best car chase of all time had to be the one from the original Gone in 60 Seconds through the Long Beach area. I’d love to see a side by side of that one but it would be like 45 minutes long!
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Yep, the earlier film was missing a lot of concrete.
I’m not at all dissing LA or any American city large or small as I know there are hidden gems that only an exploration can discover. Originally I’m from Chicago and when you see tiny little shops that have been around for decades that get swallowed up by bland corporate facades it’s sad. Sure, plenty of new business open up elsewhere and you just have to keep looking to find them. I guess I was saying that true American culture is still eternally vibrant and thriving but it becomes buried under banality that must be sought out or carved out.
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That
was
Amazing
Many parts of Long Beach are still recognizable.
The car wash manager wearing a 3 piece suit – not so much. 
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From this short clip, covering barely a mile of L.Á., you can assume a city’s present day character?
Please tell me when the upcoming parade in your honor goes down Grand Avenue…
It’s legendary. The movie itself is terrible, it’s basically a thin plot set up solely to have this epic car chase. The all-star, Jerry Bruckheimer produced 2000 remake was just not the same. Yeah it had the requisite epic car chase but it was all too slick. It was fun, but it had no soul.
Part of the reason why the original was so much fun was that it was so gritty and realistic. H.B. Halicki, in true Hollywood maverick form was the star, director, producer, stuntman, writer, main financer, and probably caterer too for all I know. The whole film was shot on a shoestring budget (some of the scenes in the film were not scripted but completely opportunistic), and some of the accidents in the chase are said to be unstaged. Halicki not only compacted 10 vertebrae on the final jump, but some he ended up having to purchase some of the cars that were inadvertently wrecked out of his own pocket.
Sadly, Halicki died in 1989 while filming the sequel from a botched stunt.
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Part of the newer has to do with earthquake building standards that emerged after the Sylmar Earthquake in 1971. Although much of damage was contained north or northwest of downtown LA, California building codes were enacted that mandated expensive retrofitting. City Hall, the Bradbury and Times Mirror buildings were among some structures able to pay for retrofitting. However, for many building owners it made more sense to tear down their smaller aesthetically-pleasing structures.
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