So I bought an Xbox 360, because I wanted to play the zombie-killing game Left 4 Dead. So sue me. (or better yet, friend me on Xbox live! I'm soggyclover! We could kill zombies together! Or, more realistically, you could kill zombies and I could take tons of damage and need to be healed all the time!)
And, being a Netflix subscriber, I hooked up the Netflix instant watch thingy through the TV. It pleases me. The picture quality is not fantastic--I would say it's slightly sub-regular DVD quality. Definitely way sub blu-ray quality. But, let's be honest, you don't really need Blu Ray for a lot of movies. (But we does need it for Lord of the Rings, don't we, precious? And the Jackson witholds the blu-ray, precious. Why? Why does he mistreat us so? Jacksons is tricksy!)
Ahem.
Time after Time looked like complete crap, but that's a (really good) movie from 1979, so it was probably a bad transfer in the first place. H.G. Wells vs Jack the Ripper in 1979 San Francisco, where they got via Wells' own time machine. Hell yeah.
And then we watched Let the Right One In, Swedish vampire movie from last year. It looked good, and convinced me that the streaming Netflix thing might be the wave o' the future. (We watched You Don't Mess With The Zohan on Sunday night, but that probably merits an entry of its own.)
Let me just say this about Let The Right One In. Holy crap, this is a fantastic movie. It's about a 12-year-old kid, Oskar, who gets picked on by bullies. A 12-year-old vampire girl moves in next door, and, well, complications ensue.
Things I loved about this movie: the cinematography. Not many horror movies really try to achieve any degree of artistry. This one has several stunningly beautiful shots (there's a kill in an underpass that is awesomely shot, and there's also a sudden fire that also just looks fantastic.). Most horror movies are content to throw spring-loaded cats at you, but this one wants to make something beautiful.
And it does. It's a beautiful, melancholy movie, but don't let those adjectives fool you--the story moves along at a pretty good clip, and there's a lot of great suspense. We were still talking about it for the whole day after we watched it, which just doesn't usually happen.
Suzanne does not have my stomach for gore, and she loved it as much as I did. This is a fantastic movie. It's a horror movie, it's a love story, and it's great. Possibly the best movie of 2008. Here's the trailer:
