360 ways to X my BOX

The story:

I have an XBOX360. I play games on my XBOX360. I download game content on my XBOX360. I find the gaming experience of my XBOX360 coupled with my rear HD projector a fantastic joy. My room is a frick'n cinema, and I get to play gears of war in that cinema. after downloading the free game content for most of my games, as well as a couple moderatly priced Guitar Hero III packs, I decided to try out the HD aspect of my projector on somthing more than games, my first HD movie.

I am one of thoes guys that waits for the format wars to be over before commiting to any one format. Hell, I had a hard time switching to DVD until the price came WAY down. so I did not purchase the HD extention for my XBOX360. I figured the nature of an external player sugested that microsoft was keeping their options open, and that if BlueRay did indeed win-out that I'd have the option of buying a BlueRay player for my XBOX360 (Have you noticed i like typing XBOX360 :) alas it looks as tho I may be waiting a long time. So in the interrum I thought I'd try 'renting' an HD movie over Marketplace, XBOX360's online content store. What should be my first HD movie? It must take advantage of all the visual candy HD has to offer, I'VE GOT IT! Appleseed ExMachina!

So I don't have quite enough micro$oft to rent the movie, so I pump it up with my credit card and download the movie... It takes TWO DAYS! Yes, mostly because of my shitty WiFi. OK, so it's not really MS' fault. So I paitiently wait for the end of the weekend, sunday rolls along and I can Finally watch my movie, Only I can't watch my movie...

So I've sat and thought about this, in an effort not to jump to any hasty conclusions driven by emotion alone. My anger at the time was palpable, it tasted like bile and gingerbeer. And god help me, I think I pouted for about five seconds. Of course I wasn't going to take this sitting down on the couch, I went to take it sitting down in front my computer. After failing to find a contact number for assistance, I hit the forums, searched for my problem, couldn't find it, searched for an email address/help form to fill out, couldn't find THAT, then gave up and played with my microcontroller.

My conclusion/assumtion of the problem is that my wifi crapped out at some integral moment when my movie was downloading its last few bits, thus disallowing it to finish downloading the last few bits or play without thoes last few bits. so i have a heaping pile of useless data that i've payed money for (not for the first time, but at least my other heaping piles worked). I would dare say this should NOT happen, it should be allowed to finish downloading or at LEAST be allowed to re-download a broken file! But what does this really mean to you? Why blog about it? Am I just whining? no. I'm telling you this so you understand when I say:

XBOX360's HD content delivery is not robust enough to compete with solid state HD data storage (eg BlueRay).

So MS, I would reccomend you either license out a third party Blueray player for the XBOX360 or beef-up your 'Marketplace' a whole-fuck-of-a-lot . But i gotta warn you, once bitten twice shy; and that movie rental bit me in the ass.

8½ stars

Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) was a recent vidi from netflix. and I must say it's rather good. I have only seen three Fellini films, two within the last month. Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957) {the other film I saw this month by Fellini} seems to have a great deal in common with 8½, both are movies about people who feel helpless in their profession and life. Both struggle with the seeming chaotic events that sweep them up and with them to an ultimately life changing decision. While Le Notti di Cabiria takes a slightly religious turn, 8½ is humanistic in it's decisions and action. Marcello Mastroianni does an excellent job portraying a director faced with indecision from the film he is trying to make, to his love life. Financial, emotional and social forces are all evenly balanced so the story doesn't fall into being another film about the making of a movie (which i am TIRED of, and the industry seems to love, movies about movies and movie-stars, and plays about plays and actors) instead the movie is about a man faced with a series of tough decisions and circumstances that have been incubated in his indecision and have now come to fruition.

Fellini's dream sequences are famous, but I'm not a huge fan of dream seqences because to do them as Fellini does you must lie to the audience to make them believe, as the character does, that it is real until it becomes too fantastic and it revealed to be a dream. Fellini and other directors pull this off successfully because the dreams are so important to the character's experience it almost doesn't matter if it's a dream or reality, the situation effects the character's decisions. Michel Gondry takes this to the extreme, almost doing away with reality altogether but keeping a semblance of it around to poke fun at and structure his story around. Fellini leaves out the stuffed horses, but still makes the dreams in this film just as important to Guido (the main character) as his waking life.

Between the two films i've seen it seems Fellini has a wonderful grasp at portraying the human experience in all it's complexities. That is what makes 8½ a good movie, the complexity in not only the responses to the driving conflict but the complexity in the conflict itself. Making the disparate parts of the conflict work together to a common climax. I am an official Mastroianni fan after seeing his great preformance in this film, and am going to check out some more of his movies soon.