A movie-tip from Ragnar for the impending weekend: Sexy Beast, starring a beastly (zing!) Ben Kingsley. He is completely arresting in this movie; when he speaks, both the audience (i.e. me) and the protagonists are unable to look away. It's one of the most realistic portrayals of a truly dangerous person I've ever seen. Kingsley isn't just pretend-bad, like the antagonists in so many other flicks; you actually believe that he's a real predator, someone you'd definitely not want to mess with under any circumstances. When he explodes, you flinch. And Sexy Beast makes you flinch a number of times. But it's also enormously funny. It's a post-Snatch British thriller, sans that movie's excessive - almost pornographic - visual storytelling techniques. When Glazer cross-cuts between three different conversations to set up the back-story, the director isn't showing off; he's actually being wonderfully economic, quickly establishing a scenario in a third of the screen-time other movies might do it in. And that, believe it or not, isn't as easy as you'd think. Go see it (or buy it on DVD). There are no excuses.  ¶ 16:40