Just caught KG's opening at the Boston Film Festival earlier tonight with my bestest pal, an award-winning screenwriter (I'll call her Trixie, since that's her alias when we go out and don't want to give our real names). Writer/directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien held a Q&A after the screening.

GENERAL: Two thumbs up from Pixie and Trixie! Better than I expected, to be honest, some good performances, beautifully shot (director of photography was present, can't remember his name), and alternately funny, touching and scary.

VIOLENCE: Gunplay, a few fistfights (including one very funny scene with Vin and a local yokel), and one particularly disturbing scene in the beginning (get ready to watch through your fingers - this one alone earns it the "R" rating).

STORY: Matty (Barry Pepper), the son of a Brooklyn underboss, has always failed to measure up to his dad's standard of manhood, yet nobody in the non-mob world seems to want to give him a chance to prove himself. He hangs with some other young mob-offspring, including Taylor Reese (Vin), who works as a collector/enforcer type for Matty's dad (played with a surprising understatement by Dennis Hopper). When Matty gets the chance to impress his dad and uncle (John Malkovich) by retrieving some money from the west coast, he entrusts the job to recovering cokehead Johnny Marbles (Seth Green), who promptly loses the cash. The story finds the boys in a small Montana town, trying to rescue the money from a crooked sheriff.

FUN FACTS: When asked directly by an audience member (not me), the directors said principal photography took place just before Vin did TFATF with four days of reshoots after. And there are two reasons New Line Cinema held the release of KG. First, the exec and marketing director who greenlighted the picture both got canned. Second, they were considering releasing the picture earlier this year, but by then, they knew the buzz on xXx was good enough that they decided to wait until after xXx's release. Now the studio's capitalizing on Vin's box-office power to pull KG out of the art-house circuit and into a general release! And Vin's character is based on someone the directors knew well - in fact, they went out on his "routes" collecting at Brooklyn bodegas with him when researching the screenplay. Both directors said Hopper and Malkovich were wonderful to the young actors, all of whom, said Brian and David, they felt extremely lucky to have gotten for their story.

NOW TO THE GOOD STUFF: I have to come clean: I was surprised at a certain delicacy in Vin's performance in this one. To be fair, only Vin and Barry Pepper's characters got significant character development (their characters are best friends and have several scenes together). Taylor seemed to have a sublte sadness just below the surface, as though he accepted his mob-enforcer-but-never-boss status with some heavy resignation. He's the center of one of the funniest scenes in the movie (you won't forget the significance of the number "500" anytime soon). Still, there's something sad about him, a weariness that's different from Barry Pepper's yearning to prove himself. He speaks consistently from the lower register of his voice (thank God for subwoofers), with a pronounced gravel (unlike Riddick, for example, who was a bit smoother for a different, scary effect). And his physical presence wasn't as cocky as Xander's or Dom's, nor as still and predatory as Riddick's. Taylor knows his place in the world and goes about his rather tough business with an earned confidence, but definitely not pride.

SPOILERY
*
*
*
*
*
*
Not every main character in this one makes it alive to the end. And this Pixie don't narc. You're gonna have to wait till general release before I'll squeal!!
*
*
*
*
END OF SPOILISH THINGS

- Pixie Khan, who knows that Vin's hotter than MA gubernatorial candidate Warren Tolman