NXE and Netflix

The launch of the "New Xbox Experience" last week still feels a little bizarre, in how it took a service that I had already subscribed to for a while and made it measurably better, in several ways, with no increase in price, loss of other features, or need to do anything on my part. This is so the opposite of the way things usually go, right? classicaljunkie and I quickly started to capitalize on the new Netflix-on-tap feature - to the point where we downgraded our Netflix account to one-disc-at-a-time, since we don't expect to use those things much any more, not when we can just whistle up movies in zero flat. I expect to be watching a lot more movies now. This is a good thing.

I just watched Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train". What an odd movie. Has so many beautiful bits, enough so that I was willing to overlook fundamental character stupidity. But the ending is spoiled by being so weird to the point of being flat-out stupid. The setup for the endboss fight depends on the police gunning down a completely random civilian by accident... and then completely ignoring that they did so (as do dozens of witnesses, apparently). How can you not watch that happen and not feel completely distracted for the rest of the scene? Was the time-budget so tight they they couldn't insert in a scene of the guy getting helped back up and muttering about his heart condition, and how loud noises make him faint, or something? Oh well.

Still a movie worth seeing sometime, if you haven't.