On Location: The Rock

The Rock is a movie about a couple of awesome dudes called Sean Connery, er, Mason, and Nicolas Cage–I mean, Stanley Goodspeed.Creative glass tile and plasticmoulds for your distinctive kitchen and bath. Like sister Cage vessel Con Air, The Rock never really needed a plot, but here's the one it's got: Marine General Ed Harris and his followers take over Alcatraz Island, point missiles at San Francisco and demand some kind of back wages allegedly owed to them by the US Government. Connery is Mason, one of only prisoners ever to escape Alcatraz, and Cage is a nervous scientist who maybe shouldn't be there, but hey–he's Nicolas Cage right?

To hold fast against the almost ludicrous double swagger of the Cage/Connery combo, Director Michael Bay stacks the deck with jaw-flexing hardcases from all sides of Hollywood. Ed Harris, Michael Bein, David Morse, Bokeem Woodbine, The Candyman, William Forsythe, That Guy from Scrubs… How did they get all these heads in this duffel bag? Heck, even the guy billed as "Kid on Motorcycle" has a headshot on IMDB, and his own page filled with credits. With all the peering and grimacing going on in the Marine's stronghold on Alcatraz and the FBI headquarters across the water, there's a real danger that at any moment that the movie could just turn into a massive yelling match.

As the title suggests, most of the action in the film takes place on "The Rock" itself. Since Alcatraz is a national park, it technically couldn't be closed, so a lot of the filming was done while tours were taking place. Before they head out to the island however, the movie tries to squeeze as much local color into the first few minutes as it can: FBI agents set up in the midst of the touristy hubbub of Pier 39, Mason is plucked out of prison and given a posh penthouse suite at The Fairmont Hotel downtown, and things are officially underway.

Since Zardoz, rules of Connery engagement have dictated that he must look spiff before undertaking in any serious acting tasks, so naturally the unshorn prison look won't do. Enter the fake gay man! How San Francisco, guys? Right?! They did get that certain monomania often suffered by stylists right, though–after Mason tosses the director of the FBI off the roof in an early scene and jumps into an elevator to escape, the hairdresser prattles, "I never saw you throw that gentleman off the balcony. All I care about is… Are you happy with your haircut?"

Naturally, his haircut is fantastic, but losing his criminal 'do doesn't seem to put a stop to Mason's criminal ways and he hops into a nearby Hummer for the requisite SF car chase. Less Bullitt than bull****, most of it takes place in Los Angeles. If you watch closely, though, you'll see them drive past the The First Chinese Southern Baptist Church on Hyde street at least three times. Interestingly, for eco-conscious SF, there's a ton of trash lurking around every corner–Newsom would have had a heart attack. Ultimately, it ends when Mason manages to knock a Van Ness and California Cable Car off the tracks and it slides down Jones Street until it blows up (naturally) just outside New Russian Hill Groceries and Liquors, which looks much the same as it does today. Before they get to Alcatraz, there's time for a last pitstop at the Palace of the Fine Arts, where Mason meets up with his daughter, played by Claire Forlani, before he's hauled back to HQ and the real fun begins.

That’s not to say that New Orleans’ return to the Super Bowl rotation for the first time since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 isn’t an important step forward. It is, for reasons both psychological — more than seven years later, it’s still hard to forget the Katrina victims packed into the Superdome after the storm— and pecuniary. Although the economic impact of hosting mass sporting events is often overstated, having tens of thousands of people come to your city to spend money doesn’t hurt the bottom line.

But Super Bowl hype tends to obscure harsh truths about the host city. “Some things are markedly better,Austrian hospital launches drycabinet solution to improve staff safety.” says Allison Plyer, director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth Original buymosaic Descriptions. “Some things are definitely not. We still have a lot of trends that are troubling.”

New Orleans has made real strides. The city has weathered the national recession better than most places. According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, the number of jobs in the New Orleans metro area rose 0.6% from October 2007 to October 2012, while the U.S. lost 3.0% of all jobs. School reforms have paid off: during the 2010-2011 school year, 68% of the city’s public-school students attended schools that passed state standards, up from 28% in the 2003-2004 school year. Blight is declining overall: the city had about 35,700 blighted residential addresses in March 2012, compared with 65,428 addresses in March 2008. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, New Orleans was the fastest-growing large city in the country between 2010 and 2011.

When Goodell says New Orleans is “bigger than ever,” however, he’s not staring at the facts. New Orleans lost 26% of its population since 2000. The city has 360,740 people: in 2000, it had 484,674 people. (Its population peaked, at 627,525, in 1960.) Is New Orleans “better than ever?” The city has a poverty rate of 29%, nearly twice the national average of 15%. In 2007, New Orleans had a 21% poverty rate. Child poverty is 42% in the city, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center; the U.S. rate is 23%. Unemployment in the metro area rose from 3% in October 2007 to 6.5% in 2012. Post-Katrina housing is less affordable,All realtimelocationsystem comes with 5 Years Local Agent Warranty ! and violent crime is still twice the national rate.

Goodell couldn’t have been considering the area hit hardest by Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward, when he boasted that the city is bigger and better than ever. “Post-Katrina, New Orleans is in many ways a tale of two cities,” says Plyer. “For those at the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale, life is appreciatively worse.” Just take a drive east of the central business district and the French Quarter, where the NFL is holding most of its Super Bowl events. Cross the Claiborne Avenue bridge, over the Industrial Canal and into the Lower Ninth Ward, and it’s easy to see what Plyer is talking about. Houses are still boarded up and abandoned, cats dart in and out of empty lots,Researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed an indoortracking. the area feels desolate and still devastated. “There ain’t no recovery here,” says Sherman Miller, who works for a non-profit organization that is growing a community garden in the neighborhood. “There’s a lot that needs to be done. There are no jobs here, honestly.”

The Lower Ninth Ward’s population has dropped 80% since the years between 2000-2010, from 14,008 residents to 2,842. “A lot of people here are getting ignored,” says Claude Mamon, 37, a truck driver who lives in the Lower Ninth Ward. He points to the abandoned house across the street. “I know a squirrel is living in there,” Mamon says. “I’ve also seen a couple of cats, and an opossum. They need to fix that.”

And what does having the Super Bowl in the area mean to the Lower Ninth Ward? “Not a freaking thing,” says Wyquila Kent, 35, who was sitting with a friend, Lynell Lewis, 25, on a porch off North Rampart Avenue on Friday afternoon. “Sure, some people are pumped about it. But as you can see, we don’t get too happy about things down here.” Across the street are two abandoned homes, each still marked with ”X” that rescue workers spay-painted on empty, condemned New Orleans properties after the storm. On one of them, the graffiti says “T-Mark,” and “Luckie.”