NEW YORK (AP) -- Does it sometimes seem like Netflix knows your tastes better than your friends, your spouse, even you?

"You loved it," the DVD rental site will remind you, offering a movie for sale that yes, by golly, you did love.

Now, they can tell you what everyone else loves, too. A new feature lets you pop in a zip code to find what's popular anywhere -- from Anchorage to Kalamazoo to Tallahassee, to anywhere else recognized by the post office.

You have to take the Netflix folks at their word -- the Los Gatos, California-based company doesn't give out specific numbers. But it's an entertaining look at tastes across the country. New Yorkers, perhaps not surprisingly, seem to like French films a lot -- but not as much as films about New York. In Miami, Cuban films dominate the list. And so on.

And yet, an important caveat. The geographical list gives you not the top rentals in a particular area, but only titles people there ordered "much more than other Netflix members." And so, we wondered, how would a straight top-rentals list look for various areas? Would the same interesting regional qualities play a role?

The answer: Not so much. Turns out we all like pretty much the same things.

"Crash," for example. The surprise Oscar winner about racial strife in Los Angeles was No. 1 not only in L.A., but on all but one of the lists we asked Netflix for: Boston, New York City, Billings, Montana, Albany, New York, and Miami. In Mobile, Alabama, it came in second.

Mobile's first choice, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (the film that spawned Brangelina), was in the top three on all lists -- except for Boston, where it came in fifth. And so on. The Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" was in the top 10 everywhere except Miami. "Hotel Rwanda," about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, was in the top 10 everywhere but Mobile. Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" and the Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson buddy comedy "Wedding Crashers" were also universally popular.

"Yes, I think taste is uniform across the country -- and across the world, and the millennia," says Richard Walter, a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "People everywhere respond to the same kind of drama, the same characters, the same conflict."

That may be basically true, but modest differences appear once you get beyond the top tier of films, says John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners.

" 'Pirates of the Caribbean' is going to work everywhere, period," says Fithian, of the Johnny Depp vehicle that's the year's biggest hit. "But there are enough differences to be statistically relevant." Family pictures, for example, play a few percentage points better in the middle of the country; R-rated fare plays better on the coasts. Foreign films play best in big cities, but are spreading somewhat.
Clicking globally, viewing locally

The new Netflix feature stemmed from internal research the company was already doing. "We thought, this is cool," says Steve Swasey, spokesman for Netflix Inc. "Let's show people what they're asking for in their neighborhoods."

He wouldn't give numbers but said the weekly lists are tabulated using a complex analysis of how members add and subtract from their queues. Scientific or not, the results are often intriguing -- and show that in many (but not all) cases, we like to watch, well, ourselves.

To wit: this week in Alaska, "Northern Exposure" tops the list in both Fairbanks and Juneau -- that's the TV series about quirky Cicely, Alaska. In Phoenix, people loved Kevin Costner in "Wyatt Earp: Special Edition," which features Tombstone, Arizona.

In Washington, D.C., a documentary on a local drug dealer tops the list. In Hawaii, it's a film about a surfing star -- from Hawaii. In Savannah, Georgia, No. 2 is Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," about the city's infamous murder case.

In New York City, Ric Burn's historical series "New York" tops the list. "New York Stories" is up there. And yes, Woody Allen's "Manhattan" makes the top 25. As does "L.A. Story" on the Los Angeles list, which is topped by "Mi Vida Loca," about the city's Echo Park neighborhood.

But type in Fargo, North Dakota, and "Fargo" is nowhere to be found. The top of that list is Disney's "Wild Hearts Can't be Broken," a family film. A bit south in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you can't find "Deadwood," which is based in the state. But the HBO series is right on top in Burlington, Vermont.

In Odessa, Texas, the top choice is "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," but you can't find "Friday Night Lights" -- about a high school football team from Odessa. You can find that film, though, on the list for Paris, Texas.

And no, film buffs, we looked. Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas" is NOT on the list for Paris, Texas.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/ ... index.html


AND this is totally fascinating:

http://www.netflix.com/LocalFavorites

SEATTLE

1. Singles
2. In the Realms of the Unreal
3. 28 Up
4. 42 Up
5. Twin Peaks Season 1
6. Hype
7. Monarch of the Glen: Series 4
8. 21 Up
9. Seven Up / 7 Plus Seven
10. 35 Up


TACOMA

1. Cowboy Bebop Remix (6-Disc Series)
2. 10.5
3. The Honeymooners
4. The Apple Dumpling Gang
5. Home on the Range
6. The Detonator
7. 13 Ghosts
8. A.I.
9. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
10. Chasing Liberty

SACRAMENTO

1. Hulk
2. Carlos Mencia: Not for the Easily Offended: Live in San Jose
3. Beyond the Da Vinci Code
4. Monk: Season 4
5. The Closer Season 1
6. Broken Trail
7. Masters of Horror: Tobe Hooper: Dance of the Dead
8. Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock
9. Sex and the City: Season 4
10. Sex and the City: Season 5

ATLANTA

1. Crack Heads Gone Wild
2. The Gospel of John (3-Disc Series)
3. Gay Sex in the '70s
4. Noah's Arc: Season 1
5. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
6. The Trip
7. Queer as Folk: Season 1
8. Salaam Namaste
9. Third Man Out
10. Adam & Steve

DENVER

1. Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
2. Greatest Places: IMAX
3. First Descent
4. South Park: Season 7
5. Cannibal! The Musical
6. Snow Falling on Cedars
7. Say Uncle
8. Africa: The Serengeti: IMAX
9. Queer as Folk: The Final Season
10. Spies Like Us

LOS ANGELES

1. Mi Vida Loca
2. The Last Mogul: The life and times of Lew Wesserman
3. The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
4. Cisco Pike
5. LA Story
6. Overnight
7. Ellie Parker
8. A Decade Under the Influence
9. The Filth and the Fury: The Sex Pistols Film
10. Mayor of the Sunset Strip

SAN DIEGO

1. Intolerance
2. A Day Without a Mexican
3. The Living Sea: IMAX
4. Galapagos: IMAX
5. Cavite
6. Dust to Glory
7. Roast of Pamela Anderson
8. Africa: The Serengeti: IMAX
9. Dolphins: IMAX
10. The Endless Summer

BOSTON

1. Laguna Beach: Season 1
2. Look at Me
3. My Architect: A Son's Journey
4. Videodrome
5. The L Word: Season 2
6. Rescue Me Season 1
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's
8. American Psycho
9. Family Guy Vol 1: Season 1-2
10. The Princess and the Warrior

NEW YORK

1. New York (8-Disc Series)
2. Barbarians at the Gates
3. Divorce, Italian Style
4. Yankee Doodle Dandy
5. Upstairs, Downstairs: Season 5
6. Ciao, Professor!
7. Sweet Smell of Success
8. Metropolitan
9. Contempt
10. Born Rich

CHICAGO

1. Expo: Magic of the White City
2. Chicago: City of the Century: American Experience
3. 21 Up
4. When a Stranger Calls
5. A Star is Born
6. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. A Film About Wilco
7. Days of Heaven
8. Palindromes
9. Seven Up / 7 Plus Seven
10. Jimmy Buffer: Live at Wrigley Field

BALTIMORE

1. Liberty Heights
2. The Corner (2-Disc Series)
3. Avalon
4. The Wire: Season 2
5. The Boys of Baraka
6. L'Auberge Espagnole
7. A Dirty Shame
8. Hairspray
9. G
10. Homicide: Life on the Street: Seasons 1 and 2

HOUSTON

1. George Lopez: Why You Crying?
2. The Cheyenne Social Club
3. Deep Impact
4. The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
5. Homeless to Harvard
6. Fullmetal Alchemist (13-Disc Series)
7. Star Trek Voyager: Season 1
8. The Alamo
9. Preaching to the Choir
10. Young Lady Chatterley

Very surprising top tens. It's not a bunch of new release garbage. People actually have some taste!...except for Sacramento.

Laguna Beach is number 1 in Boston, that's not right.

Everyone there is following Bill Simmons' lead.

i still think they have the best list though... videodrome, american psycho...

so those top ten lists are the ten most-rented films by metro? that...doesn't seem correct.

Atlanta was by far the worst

i had no idea Atlanta was that queer.

Apparently "The Trip" is also popular there...weird town

those top rentals by city have to be bullshit.

Man, I have no idea what this means for some reason

Haha...yea, I'm also finding it hard to differentiate between "top rentals in a particular area" and "titles people ordered much more than other netflix members"

I'm just guessing, but I figured it meant that while people everywhere were renting something like Crash or King Kong, there were an unusually high number of people who rented these "lesser rented" titles in that particular area. And reading back over that, it still doesn't make sense.

yeah i'd assume it just means, in most cities across they country 5 or 10 people rented these movies but in those cites 100 people did or somehting like that with bigger numbers of course

Yeah, the fact that they have Carlos Mencia at #2 automatically excludes them from having any taste at all.

Nice to see Singles in #1 in Seattle...but what's all this 28/42/21/35 Up stuff?

I wish that there was a music site that received the same amount of traffic as imdb, rating albums rather than movies. I'd be curious to see that and what the "top 250" would be.

they are movies about a study of kids that were filmed at the age of seven, and every seven years, the director has tracked them down and filmed them and their life views. Pretty interesting if you have any interest in psychology