Notes
Jessica Lange is a social worker who falls for an abandoned newborn and breaks all the rules by bringing him home. Halle Berry is the homeless druggie who dumped the baby. One of the film's best attributes is that it reveals everyone's perspective, though much of the story is told from Berry's point of view. Strung out on crack, Berry's character thinks nothing of hiding her baby in a cardboard box near a dumpster before going off for a fix. We watch Berry painfully pull herself up out of the gutter and make a life for herself. She embraces decency and sobriety and becomes the person she might have always been had her childhood been different. After Lange and her amiable spouse (David Strathairn) have formed strong family ties with this difficult child, they find themselves fighting to keep him when Berry decides she wants Isaiah back. Naomi Foner's clever script reveals a legal system that is as much a character in this painful story as the attorney (Samuel L. Jackson) who takes on the case pro bono. Though the film ultimately flounders under a hesitant ending, Lange is such a dynamo that this tragic story still comes recommended. --Rochelle O'Gorman
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.
