After a week of watching Netflix on my XBox 360 with a single bar and truly horrific quality, I finally got around to measuring my throughput and found I was getting about a twentieth of the bandwidth I was paying for. I tried calling Comcast, an exercise in futility that left me fuming, but finally got through their live chat to a technician in India, who fixed the problem in about a minute.
He told me I needed to go connect a system directly to the cable box to see if it fixed the problem. I did, but when I came back, he’d terminated the chat! Just like that, he left the room, without checking to see if the problem was resolved. I was pissed! I was livid! I was…incredibly embarrassed five minutes when I realized how dumb I’d been. Luckily, I hadn’t gone around ranting about it out loud, so at least nobody knows of my secret shame.
Point? I had one, I know I did…It’s here somewhere…oh, yeah:
When you have 5Mbps or greater bandwidth, Netflix streaming kicks ass! It won’t have the newest feature flicks, but if you like anime, documentaries, or any kind of foreign flick, you can watch them instantly from your XBox or PC running Windows and Internet Explorer with Windows Media Player 11 and 2GB of free disk space. I recommend that you start out with these flicks:
The King of Kong, a very strange “documentary” about a battle for the Donkey Kong world record, available in HD. I later found out from the Wikipedia page that one of the principle sources of dramatic tension in the film is, to say the least, wildly exaggerated, but it says something about the film that, knowing this, I still say it’s worth a watching or three.
Planet B-Boy, a documentary about breakdancing and specifically about a particular international group breakdancing competition held in 2005 in Germany. It not only has a lot of truly amazing dancing and meditation on the nature and meaning of breakdancing and hip-hop, but as it follows five crews of dancers from Korea, Japan, France, and the United States through their preparation and the contest itself, it tells a lot of very involving, compelling human stories. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a very long while.
Last Life in the Universe, a beautiful, lyrical, offbeat odd couple movie about a neat-freak Japanese ganster-cum-librarian living in Thailand and the pot-smoking good-time girl whose house he hides out in.
Super High Me, which is like Super Size Me, except with weed instead of McDonald’s. Really though, it’s very good.
Spider Lilies.
I found this during my routine Internet search for “hot Chinese lesbian
action”. It’s actually a more art-house than that description might
imply, with less nakedness than art-house might imply (read: none).
It’s a nice little human drama and relationship flick, and it’s
directed by a hot Chinese lesbian, so it’s largely sexploitation-free.
