Supposing you're right about those locations, it sounds like the filmmakers goofed in trying to fool you.

Usually, I am aware that the shooting locations rarely correspond with the purported setting of a movie, but my willing suspension of belief kicks in and I enjoy the movie on its own terms, happily settling into the new rules of reality for a couple of hours.

But I spent hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of hours hiking and mountain biking through that terrain. The only difference is that there are more houses built and that the river has more salt cedar on the banks. I once went looking for the tree where Clint got hanged at the beginning but later read that it no longer exists.

I am so familiar with the territory, that my willing suspension of disbelief couldn't kick in.

Another movie he shot in the area was the much more recent The Mule. The local paper was, of course, ecstatic to have something to report so any readers it happened to have would know every restaurant he ate at. (And if you didn't have a physical copy of the paper or an online subscription, you would usually find a photo at the establishment itself of him posing with the employees .)

On some days, part of the town would be closed off for shooting. There were advertisements for extras. I thought about applying, but the ads specifically asked for very good looking people. I decided not to waste my time or theirs.

I did watch the movie, though. Some of the roads he drove on, while photogenic, went literally nowhere. Oh well. It was still an entertaining movie.

It's not supposed to come off as "the new rules of reality." In a film, someone can walk to an apartment building and enter it, and then the film cuts to the inside of a building or an apartment as that person enters it. In reality, that apartment interior could be located 1000s of miles away from the neighborhood that you saw beforehand. It's supposed to come off as a seamless presentation of lies. Jean-Luc Godard said something to the effect of “Film is truth, 24 frames per second.” But maybe he should have said it is lies instead of truth.

I believe that any movie, no matter how effectively it presents its lies, requires the viewer to be complicit in this illusion. Fortunately, my mind usually goes along with the lie, allowing me to get caught up in the action or drama rather than focusing on the effects or cinematography. It is only upon rewatching a movie that I allow myself to critique a movie on that basis.

(Unless, that is, it is REALLY bad or something blatantly distracts me.)

I was quite young when I was yanked out of a movie like that. The film was My Name is Nobody starring Henry Fonda and that Italian actor known for superheroic slapstick bits (I can't recall his name, but you have probably seen him) and I was watching it a theater.

Anyway, part of it was filmed in a Native American village about thirty miles from where I lived. In the scene, one of the protagonists was facing a crowd of Native Americans. In the theater, there was some loud giggling behind me. I turned around and saw some of the very people that were in the film. (And the spell was broken. Instead of being lost in a story, I was watching a movie.)