A Vin-tage weekend

Sort of got obsessed (again!) with the delicious Vin Diesel after rewatching Pitch Black this week. Finally watched the sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, which bombed at the box office, and I can see why - it's not a bad movie, but it's a big sprawling mess, like they crammed at least 2 or 3 sequel ideas into one movie. And (SPOILER ALERT) they killed off the woman at the end (again!) for no other reason than it was tradition. Bummer.

But in reading about those two movies, I discovered that Vin got discouraged by his film career not going anywhere, so he wrote and directed his own movie, Strays, which is recently available on video. So I watched that. Not bad. Not brilliant, but pretty decent, considering he wore all the hats, and he wasn't 30 years old when it was made. Maybe one scene too many of the homies hanging around shooting the shit, and it ends a bit abruptly, but those are minor complaints.

While doing this extensive research, I also read many raves for Find Me Guilty, a Sidney Lumet film that nobody watched, but which virtually all imdb commenters said is a gem, so I picked that up at the library and hope to watch it this week.

Vin is currently working on a film about Hannibal, also wearing both the director and lead actor hats - you have to admire the guy, he could coast on his macho image, but he keeps challenging himself.

I also watched Feast of Love, which was decent. Not quite what I expected, but worth watching, both for the cast and for some interesting stories, which were not really very "Hollywood" - in a good way. And here's a weird coincidence, French actress Alexa Davalos has a key role in this film and in Chronicles of Riddick. Weird to see two performances in one weekend by an actress I've never heard of before (she was terrific in both).

ADDENDUM

Also had a nice chat with my brother, Leo, who had just seen The Dark Knight. He found it very dark, which I had heard, almost too much so. Said it was clearly a post-9/11 movie and thought the film was explicitly exploring themes of what is justified when combating evil.

He and I of course talked about the death of Heath Ledger, who seemed unable to handle his own ability to inhabit dark characters, and we also discussed River Phoenix who seemed to similarly succumb to his own demons. Both were terrific actors and we agreed that we feel quite cheated out of the performances of theirs that we will never see.