Last night I rented and watched Pan’s Labyrinth on my Xbox 360. It cost $4 to download the 480p version of the movie (1.3 gigs) which will ‘delete itself’ after 24 hours. The experience was flawless, there were no stutters and the media remote (which I’ve never really used) was comfortable and worked as expected. The only “problem” was the notifications that kept popping up until I went into my settings and disabled them while videos are running. And even that was smooth, I was able to access those settings without dropping out of the film (I love that Xbox button blade that just slides over whatever you are doing).
Anyway, the Xbox 360 rental experience isn’t the point… The point is that Pan’s Labyrinth is a fantastic movie! This thing defies all Hollywood conventions, it’s in Spanish (with English subtitles, of course), about a girl living through the Spanish Civil War who experiences a fantasy world, and is rated R. You’d think from the movie poster that this would be a kid movie, but it most definitely is not. The real world in this film is gruesome and bloody, but that’s war for ya.
Anyway, I’d rather not discuss details of the film because you should go into it with a clean slate. Just watch it… it’s very good (and if you don’t trust me, maybe the Academy can convince you… they awarded the movie 3 Oscars).
Whoa dude..
That sounds pretty crazy..
How long did it take to download that movie?
And (1.3 gigs) seems really small for .vob files that make up a dvd movie.
Was the quality of the picture good?
It took maybe 30 minutes to download it? I'm not even sure because it let me start watching it before it had completely finished downloading.
The movie was DVD quality, so yeah, it was pretty good!
this is an amazing informative post. I've been really wanting to see Pan's but I heard a few mixed review and REALLY I've wanted to know about the 360's movie experience...I'd test it out but the 360 being dead there is no way...