Last night my husband and I went to see The Tourist, the new Johnny Depp–Angelina Jolie thriller filmed in Venice. I wrote several months back about looking forward to seeing this film after viewing its trailer and noting the setting. I fell in love with Venice (who doesn’t?) on my first visit there a year and a half ago, and I was eager to vicariously revisit the city on the big screen. One couldn’t say the movie was a big, splashy ad for the Venice tourism bureau. Aside from some quick establishing shots of the Grand Canal and short scenes in a boat on the water and a few interiors of lush palazzos, I didn’t get to see a lot of the Venice I explored last year. That was fine; the film was entertaining, the stars easy to look at, and the plot — while not terribly complex or surprising — moved along at a good pace. I did note that, as I have witnessed in other movies filmed in locations I am somewhat familiar with, the editing and story line moves one around in ways impossible in real life. One second the characters are outside the train station at one end of the island, and they literally turn around and are suddenly at the other end. Not essential to the plot, as my brother likes to say, but it does make one realize yet again that the movie business is built on fantasy, even when set in “real” locations. David Armstrong’s First Person article on Santiago in the December issue of Global Traveler (“Point of View“) makes this point very well. He describes how his impressions of the city changed from what he had assumed about it through films he had seen which were set there and his actual experiences upon finally visiting the city. He concludes, as all travelers eventually do, that his “mind’s-eye picture” of the city based on those cinematic images “wasn’t entirely unreal, just incredibly incomplete, without nuance. And that’s the value of travel: It doesn’t simply give you more to see, it deepens your way of seeing.” Makes you want to go out and experience more of the world through your own eyes and not someone else’s camera, doesn’t it? — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor