Inflation of the film kind
There are some questions that just can’t be answered.
What is the sound of green? Why do people eat beets?
How many Eminems can you buy with 50 Cent?
Here’s one that economists win Nobel Prizes trying to explain: What causes inflation?
A lesson in Econ 101 is particularly apt here because the film “The Chronicles of Riddick” opens today. If you’ve been stranded on a distant planet somewhere south of Betelgeuse, you may not know that “The Chronicles of Riddick” is David Twohy’s sequel to his 2000 science-fiction thriller “Pitch Black.”
And the two words to keep in mind are – Vin Diesel.
It’s been only six years since we’ve even heard of Diesel. He was a member of the patrol sent out in search of James Ryan in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.” Not to spoil anything, but his character doesn’t hang around long.
Diesel was the voice of the giant in the 1999 animated film “The Iron Giant,” but he made a bigger splash the next year in both “Boiler Room” and “Pitch Black.”
He became a star in 2001 with “The Fast and the Furious,” stealing the movie from Paul Walker as if he were taking the pretty-boy actor’s lunch money.
Even so, until 2002’s “XXX,” Diesel never played the main character. In much the same way that John Carpenter’s “Ghosts of Mars” uses Ice Cube to back up Natasha Henstridge, Diesel’s character in “Pitch Black” is a convicted murderer who ends up working with Radha Mitchell to fight the forces of darkness.
Yet unlike Ice Cube, Diesel – and this is the secret of his appeal – tends to end up being be the most charismatic person on screen.
His Riddick, for example, is cunning and sly and boasting muscles harder than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s left thigh. Plus, he has the ability to see in the dark.
He may put the “anti” in antihero, but even too many mechanical killers to count have no chance against him.
Now Riddick returns for a sequel, which the world wasn’t exactly clamoring for, and his name has even been incorporated into the title. This time he’s taking on a fleet of interstellar villains who make the Borg look like Roberto Benigni.
Which returns us back to where this column began. From the trailers, it’s clear that Diesel is some sort of reluctant superhero – a kind of Neo (“The Matrix”) mix of Spiderman and Rambo, faster than a speeding laser, more powerful than an L.A. entertainment lawyer, able to leap over far stars in a single bound.
That’s Hollywood for you. Everything has to be bigger, faster, more powerful – an inflation of intent that would frighten even Alan Greenspan.
The reason film producers do this is obvious: They hope to hit the opening-weekend jackpot that “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” did ($93 million and change).
Only on rare occasions, though, does the industry give us something that’s actually better.
Most times what we get to see is the visual equivalent of beets.
Not for the first time
Another movie opening today, “The Stepford Wives,” is a remake of the 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel about a town with a lineup of strangely submissive wives. The original “Stepford Wives,” which starred the beautiful Katharine Ross, was directed by Bryan Forbes from a screenplay by two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman. It’s been available for home viewing since 1997 in DVD and VHS formats.
A newly mastered edition of the film will be released Tuesday.
If you can find a copy of the 2000 “Silver Anniversary Edition” of “The Stepford Wives,” you’ll be able to enjoy several added features, including a transfer to widescreen format, interviews with director Forbes and several of the film’s stars (including Katharine Ross) and the original theatrical trailer.
Oh, and did I say that Katharine Ross was in it?