“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

Last time out, we looked at a superior TV series (and one that was just renewed!). But Toronto has also hosted plenty of mini-series and movies of the week. Few of them have been as ambitious as 2006′s BBC production, The State Within.

The State Within is sort of a more tightly scripted, Britishy version of 24. It’s shot all hand-held with whippy cameras and split-second shots that make our job that much more difficult, especially since the series is six hours long. The show stars Jason Isaacs, a fine actor, who, like most British actors of his generation, will probably be best known for his work in the Harry Potter films. He plays a British Ambassdor to the U.S.A., who gets embroiled in a big, huge conspiracy—and that means Toronto gets to play not only Washington D.C., but also parts of London and Florida.

Just like 24, The State Within starts off with an audacious terrorist attack on an airplane. Things start innocuously enough at Pearson Airport, which we visit a few times during the series…

…and you can even see a map of Terminal 1 here.

Then they get in the car and drive onto what is rather obviously not the Washington Beltway…

…and then things really go south. It’s hardly surprising that staging this on a local road, right near the actual airport, attracted some attention and freaked some people out. This impressive setup was actually on Goreway Drive, near Woodbine Racetrack.

After the attack, the bodies are laid out at Varsity Arena.

As mentioned above, there’s lots of split-second shots and also very tightly-framed shots that zip around, making it difficult to see where we are. This, for example, is during the opening credits, and while we have no idea where it is, we’re gonna go out on a limb and say it’s in Toronto. (The pillars suggest Metro Hall, which we’ll see later.)

Here are cop cars zipping down University Avenue, by what looks like the Osgoode subway stop.

This is a bit easier to ID: it’s the Frost Building, on Queen’s Park Circle.

Another episode’s opening credits shows this guy coming out of the door of St. Andrew’s Church, on Simcoe…

…and while Roy Thomson Hall is kept off-camera, you can see the Elephant and Castle pub across the street here. That means he’s standing right in front of Hannibal Lecter’s office, which, hey, cool!

The show’s herky-jerky aesthetic means there aren’t many big establishing shots, but this one is of Washington D.C.’s very-distinctive Union Station.

But then we cut down and it’s clearly our Union Station. Theirs doesn’t have limestone pillars…

…the Skywalk…

…or GO trains.

The show uses our local institutions to portray important Washington buildings. Don’t believe the type! The “Pentagon” is actually Macdonald Block, a Queen’s Park building that we’ve seen used as a generic government building in films as diverse as The Recruit and Last Night.

And, despite the caption, this isn’t the Senate.

As you can see here, it’s actually Old City Hall.

This press conference was shot at Metro Hall, and when the Secret Service rushes in…

…they come down Mercer Street.

When the British Ambassador drives to his residence…

…he arrives at Osgoode Hall.

But the interiors, including this party room…

…this hallway…

…this dining room…

…and these stairs, are actually at the mansion that’s served as everything from the X-Mansion to Billy Madison‘s home, Oshawa’s Parkwood Estate.

Just as a bit of a break from the locations, you should know that some local actors also get some major facetime, including Aaron Abrams (who is also on Hannibal)…

…and Marnie McPhail, who was the original Annie Edison long before Community had its own Annie Edison. (We’ll pause a second so you can hum the theme song to The Edison Twins.)

Where were we? Well, yeah, there’s all sorts of spy shenanigans going on, so you get clandestine meetings, like this one, on Villiers Street…

…and this one, also in the Port Lands, with the Toronto Star building in the background.

Speaking of backgrounds, we mentioned there’s a lot of tightly framed downtown shots that are a bit tougher to spot, like this argument scene…

…this TTC stop, which is supposed to be in Tampa (the lens they used really throws off perspective but it looks like it’s maybe on Bay, near Bloor?…

…and this financial district alleyway.

This park is supposed to be D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, but it’s actually High Park…

…as you can see when there’s an assassination at the since-burned-down (and subsequently rebuilt) playground.

This fancy shmancy hotel lobby, of course, belongs to the Royal York…

…and this scene is just outside.

So is this one, complete with a Casey’s visible at the edge of the frame.

Some of the other more familiar locations include the now-defunct Canary Restaurant…

…and hospital scenes, like this, which used the city’s go-to location for hospital shoots, Humber River Regional.

CORRECTION: June 4, 10:40AM This post previously referred to D.C.’s Rock Creek Park as Rocky Creek Park. The correction has been made above.

Protestors gather in the Metro Hall rotunda.

Protestors with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and other organizations have laid down sleeping bags and blankets inside Metro Hall, the municipal building at 55 John Street, to call attention to what they characterize as a lack of access to emergency homeless shelters in Toronto.

About 50 OCAP demonstrators held a brief press conference on the steps of the building, before entering and camping out in the rotunda on the main floor. Police and security officials initially tried to restrain those bringing sleeping bags into the building, but backed off as demonstrators encircled and chastised them.

OCAP promised to open up Metro Hall as an impromptu homeless shelter when city councillors voted against an emergency debate on shelter access during a council meeting last month. OCAP has since been joined by dozens of community organizations, housing workers, and lawyers who say shelter access in Toronto is inadequate. Advocates say the City’s current level of shelter service may be exposing some of Toronto’s most vulnerable residents to unsafe conditions on the streets.

Housing activist Gaetan Heroux told reporters that despite the City’s claims that beds are available, people are languishing in the downtown shelter referral centre on Peter Street.
“There are reports of people having to wait hours, sometimes days, in order to get a bed,” Heroux said. “Why were those people not in beds if they are available?”

Anna, a community support worker who declined to say which organization she works for, said that finding an available bed is only part of the challenge. “Sometimes people have no money to get on transit to go from one space to another,” she told us. “If someone is in Etobicoke and there’s a bed available downtown, how are they gonna get there?”

Housing worker Zoë Dodd, of AIDS Action Now, echoed that concern. “When they say that there’s occupancy, sure, there may be a bed at Seaton House, there may be a bed at Good Shepherd, but they don’t talk about beds per gender, beds per youth,” said Dodd. “They’re playing politics with people’s lives.”

Mayor Rob Ford held a press conference shortly after protestors had settled in at Metro Hall. Ford condemned OCAP and repeated his skepticism about problems with shelter access. “Every single night, there are empty beds in our shelter system,” Ford told reporters inside his office. “Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt.”

The mayor also said that the City had budgeted to add “many more beds” to the shelter system in 2013. Budget documents show that no beds were added. In fact, City staff estimated that fewer people would require emergency shelter in 2013.

OCAP demonstrators have vowed to maintain their protest until City officials pledge to open up more emergency shelter spaces. They are urging homeless people and concerned community members to join them in the rotunda.

Sarah Chartell, a lawyer who works with people dealing with addictions and mental health issues, told reporters that many of her clients have to remain in jail because they cannot secure a shelter bed as temporary housing. “I have clients who could be released today on bail programs if they could provide an address,” Chartell said. “We are warehousing them in jails because there are no places for them to be released to.”

“That did not occur two years ago.”

Photo by Desmond Cole/Torontoist.

CORRECTION: March 14, 2012, 10:50 AM This post originally stated that beds per gender and per youth are talked about, when in fact those stats are not discussed. This post has been updated to reflect this.

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

As we mentioned last week in the first instalment in our multi-part fifth-anniversary Reel Toronto–thon, the average Rotten Tomatoes score for a made-in-Toronto movie sits just a fraction above 50 per cent. In fairness, the average for movies shot in Los Angeles or New York probably isn’t much better. The difference is that those movies, for the most part, take place where they were shot.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is a terrible movie, granted, but at least they shot it in New York! Glitter is just as horrible and it’s also set in New York, but it has an extra layer of terrible because of how transparent its fake New Yorkness is.

Our team of therapists advised us not to subject ourselves to all this again. “Remember how good Take This Waltz was? Live in that moment,” they begged us. But duty calls. Herewith, the most unabashedly horrible shot-in-Toronto movies we’ve profiled. To make this list, a movie can’t just be bad; it must also have made bad use of Toronto.

1   The Love Guru

The Love Guru deserves a special place, a very special place here. Unlike all the faux–New York movies we’ll get to in a second, The Love Guru‘s setting is actually Toronto. Even better, it’s about the Toronto Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup—which, sure, makes it a fantasy, but what a fantasy for Torontonians like us! And it stars (and was written by) local boy Mike Myers, who has been responsible for primo comedy in the past.

And what does it do with that all that puck on its stick? It scores on its own net and drags the whole city down with it. Oh sure, it’s clever to pretend the Scarborough Bluffs are in India…

…or to drag Kanye West down to the ACC for a pointless cameo (with Mike Myers as himself!)…

…or to desecrate Casa Loma (unless you think a sitar jam to “More Than Words” is clever).

Oh, well. If you’re strong enough, you can always take a little solace in this amazingly unlikely image. Even if the lockout ever ends, this might be the closest you come to seeing it. Now that’s scary.

2   Glitter

Glitter is generally regarded as one of the worst things to ever come out of Hollywood. It was such a dramatic failure that Mariah Carey had to step out of the spotlight and get treated for that most severe of celebrity maladies, “exhaustion.” Worse, “extreme exhaustion,” according to People magazine, which is like Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to such things.

It does make minimal effort to pretend it was really shot in New York, mostly through hyeper-kinetic montages of the skyline. Yeah, it doesn’t work. As you can see above, they sullied the Opera House…

…Monsoon…

…and Copps Coliseum in their quest for perfect awfulness.

3   Short Circuit 2

If you’re not old enough, you don’t remember the first Short Circuit, let alone comprehend the second, which was shot here. The former was one of those surprising sleeper hits (and it starred Steve Guttenberg!). It was a rather charming, if silly, mid-’80s movie about a robot that becomes sentient after being hit by lightning.

And the latter? The first mistake was going forward with a sequel even though the two stars (Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy) decided to stay out. Then they set the film in New York but didn’t spend so much as a cent to use some stock skyline shorts or otherwise pretend the movie was really shot in the Big Apple. We appreciate the footage of ’80s Toronto, but does anyone who’s ever been to Times Square think that this opening scene, outside the Eaton Centre, passes muster? Come on!

This film doesn’t try at all! If you’d ever been to New York (or even read a book about it, or seen a movie set there) you’d know that a landmark building like this is nowhere to be seen…

…ditto for this…

…and for the huge overcompensation they used to pretend Queen’s Park is in the United States.

4   Anything Starring Eugene Levy

Euguene Levy has made good movies. And TV? Dude made some of the best TV ever! He’s got a shelf full of awards! But the Hamilton native seems to have this thing about taking cinematic gigs that are close to home, but that are just consistently awful. How could we pick just one?

We were happy when Levy got a career kick from American Pie. And we’re capitalists so we don’t begrudge him doing a sequel. But why so many? Why was each more horrible than the last?! Why bring them home with you??!! Wikipedia neutrally notes that he is “the only actor to have appeared in all eight of the American Pie films.” There are eight of them? And is that something you want in your obit?

Whether donning a toga at a Thornhill mansion…

…visiting the University of Toronto…

…or the campus of McMaster, in his hometown of Hamilton, Levy has brought some serious shame to town.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 drags Steve Martin down into the muck, but at least it has the good sense to hang out mostly outside the city, like in these camp scenes shot at Burleigh Falls.

But they did come to town for some scenes, like this one at the Bloor Cinema.

We always like having Samuel L. Jackson around, but what genius thought a mismatched cop comedy thingie called The Man would work? Whether dining at the Kingsbrae Diner…

…failing to muster sufficient production savvy to move a garbage can in order to preserve the illusion of Big Apple–ness..

…or turning the Direct Energy Centre into an airport, there’s a lot of bad going down. Worth noting: Levy earned a Razzie nomination for the feat of producing The Man and Cheaper by the Dozen in the same year. He lost the Razzie to Torontonian Hadyen Christensen for his Revenge of the Sith performance. But Levy, at least, got to sleep in his own bed.

And New York Minute is just a vehicle for the Olsen Twins, so even the whole cast of SCTV couldn’t save it. Bringing in Andrea Martin for some filming at the Toronto Centre for the Arts couldn’t help.

They also tried to pretend Weston Road…

…and the Georgetown GO station are in New York. But none of it works.

5   Three-Way Tie: Terrible Action Movies

Again, you can’t blame us for refusing to pick just one of Exit Wounds, Maximum Risk, and Death Wish V. Three movies, all ostensibly set in the States (mostly New York, again!), all feature over-the-hill action stars in lesser works. There’s no postmodern Expendables irony here, folks. Just weak moviemaking.

Like, Steven Segal’s Exit Wounds is supposed to be set in Detroit and yet we see the CBC atrium…

…and Metro Hall.

Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Maximum Risk was shot at the classic Canary Restaurant…

…the Zanzibar…

…and tries to pretend the Yonge-Dundas area is actually Times Square.

But the real bottom of the barrel is Charles Bronson’s Death Wish V. Whether they’re pretending Knox College is a courthouse…

…throwing a guy through the window on Colborne Street…

…or asking you to believe our skyline looks anything like Manhattan’s, they’re just courting disaster from start to finish.

As you can see, there are many ways to shoot a bad movie in Toronto. Clearly, pretending Yonge Street looks anything like Times Square is a start, and doing a sequel doesn’t hurt either. But if you can work the otherwise-very-talented Eugene Levy in there too? Well, then, you’ve really got our attention.

Next Week: Cult classics and guilty pleasures.

Sometimes you have to hang your head in shame and admit you were wrong. When we featured Stanley & Iris last month we were correctly upbraided for mistakenly thinking its local shoot was the only time the great Robert De Niro came to town to film a movie. In fact, he was also here for 2004′s Godsend. How could anyone forget Godsend?

After all, it stars fellow Oscar nominee Greg Kinnear, as well as the rather attractive Rebecca Romijn (both of whom spent time here on other occasions, while filming A Flash of Genius and X-Men, respectively). And, let’s see here…yes, Godsend earned the respect of a staggering 4% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes, putting it firmly in the same class as Mariah Carey’s godawful Glitter. And Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

(Note: We’ve never done the math, but one day we should assess the scientifically calculated average RT Rating for Toronto movies. We suspect it’s around 35%, max.)

Sometimes it takes a lot of digging and re-watching to find film locations, but this one was pretty easy—a good thing given its level of quality.

While the credits are still rolling, Greg Kinnear gets mugged in this alley…

…which is actually St. Enoch’s Square, right near Massey Hall.

The problems start when Romijn and son go shopping on Front Street. We pan down from this shot…

…to find them walking through Berczy Park a few minutes before the kid gets hit by a runaway car. You can’t miss the St. Lawrence Centre on the left, there.

Then they go shopping at this store, on Front Street, which seems now to be a Winners.

After the kid’s untimely passing, he’s buried at the St. James Cemetery…

…and this church is actually St. Matthias, down on Bellwoods.

Enter De Niro, slumming as some kind of scientist who offers to clone the couple’s dead kid. Except he’s messing with science so the kid ends up with supernatural powers and shit gets real, yo. First, he takes them out for a lovely meal at The Senator.

The interior…

…and exterior of De Niro’s snazzy hospital, The Godsend Institute…

…is actually the Kingsbridge Conference Centre, out in King City.

Here’s Romijn out for a stroll in Forest Hill Village…

…where she ducks into this framing store on Spadina, which is actually Framed by Izzy. The magic of Hollywood!

Eventually the family moves out to live in “Vermont.” This lakefront house…

…which you can see a bit better here, is actually on Lake Simcoe, at Roche’s Point.

Kinnear is a teacher and the school scenes were shot at Loretto Abbey.

Late in the movie, he heads into the, city which is supposed to be Boston. You buying?

He drives along the lakeshore industrial district…

…pulls up outside Metro Hall…

…and visits this police station, which is actually the Ontario Heritage Trust building, on Adelaide.

This more working-class-looking area is actually Howland Avenue, below Dupont.

This cozy domicile has since been replaced with something fancier.

We’re happy to have you back any time, Mr. De Niro. But let’s aim a little higher, perhaps?

The short summary is that super-duper-criminal-badass Lawrence Fishburne is arrested and held at this old, about-to-close police precinct on New Year’s Eve. His homies come to free him and chaos ensues.
The precinct interior is a set, of course. We had to peer through the CGI snowflakes to peg the exterior as 121 Industry Street. The building has a rather cool story, having once served as a facility for Ferranti-Packard, makers of electrical transformers. The city bought it a few years ago and turned into the Mount Dennis TTC garage. It was originally going to be part of a railyard for the Eglinton Subway.
We even found this informative mini-movie about all the important industries once located in Weston that left as the community evolved.

The flick starts with undercover dude Ethan Hawke and his partners chasing some drug fiends around an apartment complex. When they burst outside we can see they are at 260 Wellesley Street East…

…and the camera pans up the tower.

Then we find Fishburne getting arrested outside a church. This is actually the landmark St. Andrews Church on King Street and Simcoe.

If you want to appreciate the art of cinematography you can compare the warm pictures of the chapel here to how it looks in Assault.

Hey—is that Gabriel Byrne? Yes! And is that Roy Thomson Hall over his shoulder? Yes, again! Metro Hall, in which this scene was shot, might give the Distillery District a run for its money as our most popular shooting location.

We had fun finding this one. The bus carrying Fishburne and other inmates to the precinct pulls out of this random garage-looking place and turns right. Luckily, we can identify that “EF” sign across the street as belonging to EF International Language Schools on Portland Street.

Despite being in Detroit, the precinct seems to be near a rather large forest, perfectly placed for a thrilling finale. These scenes were shot in Morningside Park.
And there you have it. A typical not-horrible, shot-in-Toronto flick!

Exit Wounds is bad, and it was shot here. That’s all you really need to know. Not since Short Circuit 2 have we seen such a bad, poorly executed movie or had as much fun grabbing screencaps galore. We’d call these “mistakes,” but that implies someone was trying to do something right in the first place. Doubtful. Otherwise-talented folks like Jill Hennessy and rapper DMX demean themselves here, and you almost pity them.
Just look at this travesty of an opening credits sequence! The vice-president is speaking somewhere in Detroit, which happens to be right outside Metro Hall.

They even have the temerity to put Roy Thomson Hall right out in the open. Oddly, this prominent display was not cited in the obituaries of recently deceased architect Arthur Erickson.

You can also see the exterior of the CBC building in this sequence, but that’s not as disturbing as the notion that Mother Corp allowed the crew to film a big shootout in the atrium, as you can see here and in the first shot up above.

You’ve got a cop movie? Well, then you need a police station! Serving as the exterior is the HQ of the Ontario Heritage Trust, on Adelaide Street.

Here is a galling scene where Isaiah Washington muses on how the neighbourhood has gone to seed. And what is the background for this depiction of a neighbourhood so bad that even Detroit cops are down on it? Why it’s Yonge Street, north of College! Just look at that dilapidated YMCA! Oh, sure it’s actually the quite lovely Metro Central location on Grosvenor, but when you’re in the scene you really feel the decrepitude, eh.

We could let that slide, but what the whosis? A pixel board ad for the SkyDome?! In Detroit?!!

When you go to a Seagal film you don’t just want action. No, you want comedy, right?! Well, here’s some for you: it’s Seagal, kicked down to traffic cop duty, directing gridlock on Front Street. You can spend all day spotting landmarks, such as the Flatiron Building…

…and even the Church and Front Second Cup.

They also shot this scene in the Flatiron’s pub, which is today called the Down One lounge.

If you’re a down ‘n’ out cop you just have to live in a boathouse, don’t you? Well, here’s Stevie’s, near Cherry Street and Villiers. And, HEY, ain’t that the bottom of the CN Tower across the water? Tsk, tsk!

Seagal also rocks the nightclub scene, kicking ass at Tonic.

Of course, this being an R-rated movie, you need to a hit a peeler, and since this is the best screeencap we could post, you’ll have to take our word that this is Zanzibar.

The poster of this YouTube clip is only too happy to describe this as “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.” It’s up to you if you want to suffer through three minutes and fifty-five seconds to see a couple of losers tooling down Queen Street, right in front of City Hall.
The car dealership is actually 740 Dupont, better known as Grand Touring Autos.

Early on in the flick is a big action sequence on this bridge, which had us scratching our chins. Where in fair Toronto could it be? Or could it actually be in Detroit? Then we saw the shot below.

Charles, what now! That ain’t the CN Tower! And it ain’t Motown! Nope, that’s the Calgary Tower. Hey, do you know what building in Detroit looks a bit like the Calgary Tower? If you guessed “no building ever conceived devised, planned, contemplated, or built,” you are correct!
That’s right. They flew all the way out to Alberta to stage this shoot-em-up on the Centre Street Bridge.

There’s also a couple of big chase scenes. This one zips around Toronto, blasting by the Scotiabank Paramount Festival Hall thingie…

… and the CityTV building.

This chase, during the finale, is so big that Toronto couldn’t contain it. It starts out in the Charles Street Green P (you can see the Comfort Hotel sign across the street here)…

…and explodes out onto King Street. But not our King Street; it’s the one in Hamilton which has Detroit food faves like Pizza Pizza…

…and Tim Horton’s.

But the post-chase blab takes place back here, outside the Oriental Gourmet House on Temperance Street.

The final, pointless scene here was shot at the Orde Street Public School. If you’re an alumnus, how proud you must be: Steven Segal AND Tom Arnold!!
That’s all we have to say on the matter, but if you really can’t get enough of this crap, you might enjoy reading the production notes, which treat this thing like a real movie. Did you know it’s based on a novel? Do you want to hear producer Dan Cracchiolo describing the material as akin to “edgy, gritty, cop pictures like Dirty Harry and Serpico, those great ’70 movies that were for our generation what Westerns were to earlier generations”?
Yeesh. Get us some of whatever he’s been drinking.

“Don’t give me lip! I’ve made a career starring in cyber-themed movies that take place in abandoned subway stations!”
Johnny Mnemonic is basically a road movie that takes place entirely between Bloor Street and Lake Ontario. At the northern end of that district we find local boy Keanu Reeves strolling with Dina Meyer on the tracks leading in the Lower Bay train station (you can watch eight whole seconds of the scene).
A few years ago, Lower Bay subway station was one of the great hidden Toronto legends. Thanks to Nuit Blanche and some TTC construction last year, it’s lost a little of that mysterious cachet, but it’s still a fun and unique site to see on celluloid.

Raves, subway stations, cyber-shit: all in a virtual day’s work for Keanu Reeves and company.
Now, there’s this bad dude and he hangs out in a club where a rave is going on, and we’ll be gosh-darned if it ain’t at our very own Opera House. The distinctive balcony area is where he’s sitting, but you can catch some nice glimpses of the floor and stage areas too.

From Keanu to the Cowboy Junkies, the Church of the Holy Trinity has got style.
Now, there’s this church, see. And living there is some weird Jesus-looking dude played by Dolph Lundgren of all people. Maybe there’s some subtext or something going on there; it was hard to tell on fast-forward. What we did catch is that the exterior was shot at the Church of the Holy Trinity. Yeah, it’s that little place tucked in behind the Eaton Centre and it’s also where the Cowboy Junkies recorded The Trinity Session.
The interior scenes were shot at Riverdale Presbyterian Church.
Despite that location’s important place in local film history, it has since been converted into 32 lovely condo units. Whether the one-time presence of the man who played both He-Man and Ivan Drago was a selling point, we do not know.

No word on whether the Old Spaghetti Factory remains open after the apocalypse.
A little smoke and garbage lend a nice post-apocalyptic feel to “Newark.” We mean, without all that you might recognize our friendly downtown Novotel and The Esplanade bearing off to the left. Despite the filmmakers’ efforts, some of the skyline shots seem a bit familiar to Torontonians, but pobody’s nerfect, right?

Even in the background, the Eaton Centre is no wallflower.
One such smoky, grungy streetscape is the rather cool O’Keefe Lane. It’s a tucked away location but, as you can see above, it’s awfully close to shopping mecca, the Eaton Centre. This random-but-cool YouTube video gives a great sense of how this un-Toronto-looking alley looks in the daytime.

For all its faults, no film which contains a scene like this is irredeemable.
Keanu Reeves starred in Hamlet. Keanu Reeves got famous for saying stuff like, “woah.” Keanu Reeves starred in one of the biggest (if ultimately disappointing) motion picture trilogies of all time. And yet never, never ever, did he commit himself as an actor like he did delivering this monologue. It’s some powerful stuff. It at least shows the movie is not without a sense of humour about itself.
Our advice? Print off the following text, head down to Villiers Street near the docklands, climb on top of a car, and recreate this cinematic moment with your friends.
“Listen! You listen to me! See that city over there [New York, natch]?! That’s where I’m supposed to be! Not down here with the dogs and the garbage and the fucking last month’s newspapers blowing back and forth!! I’ve had it with them!! I’ve had it with you!! I’ve had it with all this!! I…WANT…ROOM SERVICE!!! I want the club sandwich!! I want the cold Mexican beer!! I want a ten thousand dollar a night hooker!! [pause] I want my shirts laundered. Like they do at the Imperial Hotel. In Tokyo.”

Nah, they haven’t started the Union Station renos yet. It’s just a futuristic movie.
Probably the most recognizable local location is the makeshift hospital set up in the great hall of Union Station. The dim lighting and people lying around confirm it’s Union, but the clock in the centre seals the deal.

Our erstwhile quasi-City Hall gets a little face time. Nice.
Probably the most unrecognizable location is Metro Hall. Has anyone ever gone into this place other than movie shoots? It’s not the most exciting building, but between this, Blues Brothers 2000 and X-Men, it’s building a nice filmography.

If this were in focus you’d totally know it’s Casa Loma.
There are also a few hazy blink-and-you-miss-em shots of places like Casa Loma (above), Spadina House and Allan Gardens. Yep, Johnny loves the T-dot.
Hopefully, we’re not pissing off a legion of hardcore Johnny Mnemonic fans with our cavalier attitude towards the film. We’ve seen worse flicks, but we hope you understand this Reel Toronto stuff ain’t always fun and games. Sometimes it’s down ‘n’ dirty. Sometimes, you just want the club sandwich, metaphorically speaking.