Movie Geography
Posted by Sonic Charmer on July 6, 2009
Netflix has a feature called “see what’s popular somewhere else”. This allows you to enter a location (city/state or zip code) and get a list of movies that people in that location are currently renting “much more than other Netflix members”.
I wish I had time to poke around and explore in greater detail because the results seem potentially interesting. Here’s the top 5 for New York, New York:
- Rogue Trader (an older B-movie-quality Ewan McGregor Wall Street movie)
- The Last Kiss (all I know is this was remade in English as a Zach Braff vehicle)
- New York Stories
- Next Stop, Greenwich Village
- L’Innocente
Wall Street shenanigans, Italian stuff, and movies with “New York” in the title. Predictable?
How about Mountain View, California (home of Google):
- Palo Alto (lo-budget wannabe college-angst thing that I couldn’t get through)
- A Wednesday (Indian movie)
- Die Another Day
- The Valet (French Daniel Auteuil movie)
- Physics: The Elegant Universe And Beyond (documentary)
So: local interest, nerdy stuff, Indian stuff, and crappy but action-packed (read: international-friendly) James Bond vehicle. Yup, rings true as stuff that might be rented by Google engineers.
What about, for no apparent reason, Ames Iowa?
- Iowa (indie meth thriller)
- Beverly Hills Cop III
- The Final Season (HS baseball movie with Sean Astin from “Rudy”)
- K-19 the Widowmaker
- Beerfest
Local place in title, sports movies, beer movies, military movies, and crappy Hollywood comedy schlock like you’d pick up for the kids on a trip to Wal-Mart. This rings true as well!
What I find fascinating is how utterly predictable are the movies that filter up to the top of this. You put in New York, a lot of Woody Allen comes up. You put in heartland America, and sports movies come up. And of course having the name of a local place in the title of the movie is a surefire winner.
How about, oh, Ashland Oregon, the granola-crunching home of a yearly Shakespeare festival? “Lefty agitprop, foreign movies and lesbian stuff”, I guessed before even typing it in. And I was right! (#1: Hearts and Minds, Vietnam doc. #2: Foyle’s War, British serial. #13: Three Days Of The Condor, Robert Redford vehicle of “This is about oil isn’t it?” fame. #15: The L Word….)
Are people so predictable? Is geography destiny? Or does culture determine geography?
The next step is for some enterprising programmer to create an app that scans your movie preferences/ratings and uses these lists to compute your ideal location. Where should you be living, purely based on your movie tastes? From what I’ve seen here, the results look as if they might end up fairly robust.
