no subject

Christmas child in Peru named Brian.

1990s SF film

The Astronaut's Wife, 1999, USA   WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY RAND RAVICH
It was Johnny Depp's interest in American heroes gone bad that brought him into this film, and while not a complete dud it's distinctly minor compared to some of his better projects. This is a deliberately ambiguous movie with a psychologically taut screenplay, not least in its influences which run from The Quatermass Experiment and I Married a Monster from Outer Space through to the most obvious, Rosemary's Baby (Charlize Theron also sports a Mia Farrow-like haircut), and it teases you into working out what's going on as the film progresses. The most intense performance is from the completely reliable Joe Morton, playing a NASA scientist who's onto the aliens (his SF credentials are good, having also starred in the 1984 low-key indy movie The Brother From Another Planet), and Ravich's direction for Morton's scenes changes significantly to add to his character's intensity. George Clinton's delicate but ominous music works as it should but too often it's the only thing that connects many of the scenes emotionally. (Another small musical point: the soundtrack contains the Sid Vicious version of Frank Sinatra's My Way; at the time Depp himself was playing with The Sex Pistols' former drummer Steve Jones in their band 'P'). Theron puts her heart and soul into the film while Depp mostly just cruises, unconvincingly. Of the two endings filmed Ravich's originally intended one is marginally better because the cinema-release version just went for a predictable, cheap shot. Not a great SF movie, probably because the concept is so derivative and one-dimensional, yet given its rather limited scope it's also hard to see how the screenplay itself could have been put across differently.