"I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical." – Arthur C. Clarke

If you read your weekly horoscope – as I most certainly do not; typical Libran, far too level-headed to believe such a complete pile o' crap – you may have noticed that your star sign has changed this week. You might even have been an Ophiuchus all along, a 'serpent slayer' no less, and you would never have known it if you were born between 29 November – 17 December.

I may be on the wrong side of 50 but I can still recall a previous attempt at adding not one but two new zodiac signs: Ophiuchus, and Cetus the whale, which, my spies tell me, are the only two Zodiac constellations not recognised as star signs. This was as far back as 1970, proposed by Steven Schmidt (typical bloody Cancerian, can't leave anything alone) in his book Astrology 14, and I can even remember reading this article in my old man's Time magazine, now reproduced online, when I was just 10 years old.

So I'm now a Virgo, apparently. Whatever. Worse pay, better hours.

2000s SF film

Cold Souls, 2009, USA/France   DIRECTED BY SOPHIE BARTHES
New York stage actor Paul Giamatti is undergoing the long dark tea-time of the soul, unable to separate himself from the angst-ridden characters he plays, so he decides to put his soul into storage and live a soulless existence. Which is fine up to a point, but after his acting suffers he then rents the soul of a dead Russian poet before wanting his own soul back, only to discover it's been traded in a soul-trafficking racket with Russia and ending up in a talentless soap-opera actress who believes she's got the soul of Al Pacino. If all this sounds very Being John Malkovich that's because it is but this film does have its own distinct origin and identity, similarly as a comedy drama but also, and trust me on this, no less scientifically rational than a film like Inception. Giamatti, playing himself, consistently delivers a schizophrenic performance with the right sympathetic tone throughout; the Russian actress Dina Korzun, as the 'mule' Nina who smuggles souls into and out of New York, gives a performance that engages the mind, and David Strathairn as the genial but flawed scientist-salesman Dr. Flintstein somehow makes everything seem perfectly normal. It's hard to believe this was a debut feature film for the French director Sophie Barthes, who turned out an off-beat and existential science fictional gem that also ends on an admirably melancholy note. Highly recommended!

2000s SF film

Pandorum, 2009, Germany/USA   DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN ALVART
In the 22nd century crew members of the one-way space mission Elysium wake up from a long hypersleep with little or no memory, and discover there's also something inhuman and dangerous aboard their enormous spacecraft. This might have been a straightforward update of It! The Terror from Beyond Space or even Alien, but there are a few extra threads to the story that make it original despite also resembling a 'film of a video game', which it isn't (the producers had a previous credit with the Resident Evil films). The spacecraft interiors are impressive although frequently inexplicable – 12 sets were created to provide for 45 different scenes – but then they were also designed to provide plenty of opportunity for running around in dark corridors and serve as the imposing background for the kind of twists and shocks that are lapped up with a big spoon by fans of this kind of mild horror SF. Dennis Quaid gives an authoritative enough performance but sees little action himself, and the creatures unfortunately look fresh out of Serenity, which is probably to dismiss them a little too easily as insufficiently scary. Two more Pandorum films were cancelled after this one's poor box office showing; it's easy to see why as it recycles far too many clichés, but does well enough what it set out to do regardless of its limited scope for invention.