Movie Night

I rented a couple of movies today, something I haven't done in quite a while. (Mainly because I've still got a bunch of stuff here that I haven't watched yet, but for some reason none of it appeals to me very strongly just at the moment.) I ended up with K-PAX and The Astronaut's Wife, which made kind of an interesting double bill.

K-PAX was highly recommended to me by several people, and, yeah, I did enjoy it. It was a fun movie, at least by my own possibly idiosyncratic definition of "fun". You probably already know this, but it's about a guy (played, appropriately enough, by Kevin Spacey) who claims to be from outer space. He gets locked up in the loony bin (because where else would you put a guy who thinks he's from outer space?), but there are all kinds of indications that, hey, maybe he might really be from outer space after all. But then, there are also all kinds of indications that he's not. The fun comes in trying to decide what the actual answer is, and the movie does a very nice job of making both alternatives seem about equally plausible at various points.

The Astronaut's Wife I kind of have mixed feelings about. It's about, um, an astronaut's wife (surprise, surprise). During a spacewalk, said astronaut is caught in some kind of explosion, and he's out of contact with NASA and the shuttle for two minutes, and when he comes back to Earth his wife gradually starts to suspect that something weird happened to him up there and that he's no longer quite himself. It's a pretty creepy movie, but it's also pretty slow. And, while slow can actually work to enhance the effect if it's creepiness you're going for, it's a thin line to walk because the creepiness has to be sufficiently creepy to offset the slowness. Otherwise suspense gives way to boredom. Unfortunately, this movie teeters right on the edge of the acceptable creepiness/slowness ratio, so it almost manages to be creepy and dull at the same time, which is really kind of a weird effect.