Hollywood

Astronaut has great visuals, especially Depp’s dream sequence of the alien attack, good photography and is fairly suspenseful. But overall it fails to impress. Tepid performances by the lead stars, especially the wooden and pretentious Depp, who looks like an alien lifeform anyway.

And with itsopen-to-conclusions and evil wins end, in most respects, its like an extended X-Files episode made with an awful lot of money.

The Bone Collector
Nearly a decade ago, Jonathan Demme made Silence of the Lambs and the diet of the movie’s principal star Anthony Hopkins made the actor extremely unpopular in dinner joints. Then there was David Fincher’s chilling Seven. And now there’s Bone Collector, a movie set in the same grisly flesh and gore genre, which goes a bit deeper.

Denzil Washington is the ace forensics detective who turns into a quadriplegic, paralysed neck-down, after an on the job accident. His formidable detection skills are called in by the department when a serial killer goes on the rampage, leaving behind a trail of clues which apparently only Washington can solve. The movie’s Clarice Starling is played by Angelina Jolie, a rookie street cop whose nose for forensics catches the eye of Washington who has her put on the trail of the killer.

The movie has hugeplotholes that make for a very bumpy ride. Forensics is given precedence over all other aspects of crime detection. And some of the killer’s clues are a bit convoluted, almost as if he was sticking to the script. Sticking separate fragments of a book-publisher’s logo into several victims to lead Washington to the book after which the film is named is frankly pushing our imagination. The identity of the killer is one of those `butler did it’ denouments and the reasons for the killings are a bit unconvincing.

The film is helmed by Philip Noyce who brought Tom Clancy novels like Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger to the big screen.

Washington, as always, delivers a competent face-only performance and Jolie is passable. Bone Collector is fairly average, but still way way behind classics like Seven and Silence.

Lake Placid
Jaws returns yet again, only this time it’s the mandibles of a rapacious reptile that are terrorising a small US town. Thepredators seem to have a small town prediliction and there’s practically a movie-a-week about either a bunch of intelligent sharks or overgrown snakes and lizards hunting down innocent people.

The film has a nonexistent and utterly predictable plot which is so been there seen that, that it barely needs mention. A desolate lake in a New England town witnesses attacks by a mysterious predator. A Jaws-type all-male starcast would draw flak. (And of course the film is scripted by Ally McBeal writer-producer David E Kelley.) So in steps Bridget Fonda as the dinosaur expert who’s sent in to investigate by a New York-based natural history museum. She joins a wildlife supervisor Bill Pulman and a grouchy sheriff Brendan Gleeson. Falling out of the skies, quite literally, is heli-borne millionaire crocodile expert Oliver Platt. And the odd bunch work to trap the reptile.

The loony plot with its cliched scare scenes, amuses, and even the appearance of Stan Winston’s computer generated creature failsto invoke any fear. For a while the film thrashes about like one of the crocodile’s many victims, but is salvaged from plunging to the depths of B-moviedom only thanks to Platt and his unending stream of witticisms. Watch it only for him.