A retired British gangster (Ray Winstone) is trying to keep out of a London heist, despite the efforts of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a goateed, shaved-headed pit bull of a gangster in this raw, startling film that grabs your attention and never lets go. Gary "Gal" Dove lounges at his villa on Costa del Sol, with not a care in the world, until his Mediterranean paradise is interrupted by Logan, just arrived to recruit Gal for a London heist led by mob boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Gal refuses the job; Logan won't hear it. He's human nitroglycerine, ready to explode at the slightest provocation, spewing Cockney profanities like armor-piercing bullets. Sexy Beast presents him as hilarious and horrifying, a soloist whose instrument is pure, bilious rage. Kingsley's volatile performance--the polar opposite of his Oscar®-winning role in Gandhi--expands the actor's range into startlingly unexpected territory. It's the white-hot center of Sexy Beast, but the feature debut of director Jonathan Glazer (after acclaimed TV commercials and music videos) is equally noteworthy for the performance of the lesser-known Winstone, and also for Glazer's brass-knuckle approach to what is, essentially, a conventional gangland thriller. Glazer's instincts aren't always sound (dream sequences involving a hideous man-rabbit prove a bit too peculiar), but with pugilistic rhythm and a humorous knack for combining well-chosen songs and a rough, kinetic visual style, Sexy Beast is a wild ride. --Jeff Shannon.
Entertainment
The entertainment industry has grown and evolved over the years with music and cinema taking a new form through the ages and so have the technologies that fuel it. Gone are the days of eight songs on a cassette and VCR players with merely two hours of entertainment recorded on a single video cassette. With the advent of computers came digital data storage and hence the birth of DVD/CDs.
Quiet a step back in matters of physical form as these new generation audio/video storage devices hold an uncanny resemblance to the records that preceded the cassette generation. DVDs and CDs today are an everyday household entertainment storage device which has come a long way since the first records and cassettes were distributed commercially.
Notable advantages of DVD/CDs have to begin with the amount of storage space available. These days its possible to burn multiple movies on a single DVD and as far as audio goes if its in a highly compressed format such as .mp3 a single CD can accommodate multiple music albums. These discs are easy to handle, light and portable with no moving devices unlike the tape generation however they are delicate and a scratch on the DVD/CD surface could cause a disruption in the information being read by the player.
DVD/CDs were initially invented to provide high quality audio/video data to a user with the ability to regulate its production however this soon fizzled away with daily household computers gaining the ability to burn data in such formats. The race to curb piracy through such means has not hit a roadblock and DVD/CDs keep evolving with newer encryption technologies in a bid to curb unchecked replication of data spawning newer technologies like Blu-ray discs which seems to be yet another milestone on an unending road of innovation.
