Notes
Legendary police commissioner Niémans (Jean Reno) travels to a remote university village in the Alps to solve a grisly murder while hotheaded Lieutenant Kerkerian (Hate's Vincent Cassel) is investigating the desecration of the tomb of a young girl killed in an auto accident 20 years ago. When the detectives discover that the incidents are related, they reluctantly join forces. The Crimson Rivers looks French but feels American. If it doesn't hit the heights of The Silence of the Lambs or Seven, it bests many of the thrillers that have followed in their wake. Mathieu Kassovitz directs as if this were high art, which is actually to the film's benefit: the cast is terrific (including Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vincent's father), the cinematography is stunning, and the classy score evokes The Exorcist. Although the mountaintop showdown at the end doesn't quite work, The Crimson Rivers is still a superior entrant into an increasingly overcrowded genre. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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.
