Last night, following the example of Cara, Rob and I drove to the Egyptian-themed megaplex to see The Chronicles of Riddick, a movie that seems to exist only to provide excuses for people to scream, “Riddick!” with varying amounts of consternation. Riddick is a bad guy who is acting like a good guy in order to kill some even badder guys: the interplanetary version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He wears dark goggles for the sole purpose of dramatically tearing them off his head when he is confounded by something, and says all of his lines in what Rob called his “morning voice.”

In general, I thought it was an interesting movie spoiled by hokey dialogue. Or perhaps the hokey dialogue mitigates the pretension of the concept, averaging out to a tolerable experience. Although I would imagine that, like myself, many rational people would have the urge to walk out after the first five minutes, my advice is to stick it out. It gets better, and you’ll kick yourself if you miss the Valuable Life Lesson, which is this: If your name is Riddick, people are going to scream your name a lot with varying degrees of consternation. If your name is not Riddick, there is a very good chance you will die.

I recently saw an interview with Vin Diesel. He is a beautiful and hard-working man, and I often find myself wishing that the results of his labors were not so ridiculous. But they are, which is why when he said, with a straight face, that he had always wanted to work with Dame Judi Dench, that he had dreamed about it at night, I almost fell out of my chair laughing: I was trying to imagine Judi Dench saying the same thing about Vin Diesel, and I just couldn’t.