So, I'm far, far away from home as I write this, currently attending a film festival in Korea and, surprisingly, my Asian sojourn has got me wondering whether 2009 is going to end up going down as the year that Hollywood re-embraced high concept science fiction in which nothing goes boom at all, after a long time wandering in the 'only for kids' wilderness.

The attention given Duncan "Son of David Bowie" Jones' Moon, which has done pretty respectable numbers in limited release, got things rolling earlier this summer and next up is Sophie Barthes' Kaufman-esque comedy Cold Souls, which was a hit at Sundance, gets a limited release in early August, and which I've just seen here.

Paul Giamatti stars as, well, Paul Giamatti, an acclaimed actor in the throes of an emotional crisis while he prepares for a stage performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Seems the character has dug its claws into him a little bit, leaving Paul prone to panic attacks and doubting his ability to continue. The solution? Soul extraction and storage. Pop that baby out -- it looks remarkably just like a chick pea -- stick it in a jar, park it in cold storage and, presto! Panic gone!

Unfortunately, pretty much all of Paul's emotions are gone along with it -- a serious problem for an actor. To compensate, he rents other souls before opting to return to his own, only to find that it has been stolen and smuggled to Russia, where it is now the property of a bad soap-opera actress who thought having the soul of a famous American actor would be good for her career.

Yeah, there are obvious shades of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind here, though Barthes stays away from the manic absurdity of Kaufman's work. I once saw a critic refer to Malkovich as a drunken bet between two college frat boys who were entirely too smart for their own good, a criticism nobody will be levelling at Barthes any time soon, considering the writer-director keeps things considerably more grounded. The humor is mostly understated, the film taking on the character of its lead actor as easily as Giamatti himself swaps souls in the picture. Where Giamatti is concerned, this is probably the most pure representation of his particular genius since American Splendor, a role that only he could have played and not just because he happens to be playing himself.

So, yeah, it's good. But to get back to the point I began with, though these sorts of films tend to turn up from time to time and generally find a willing cult waiting for them, they tend to arrive in isolation. To have two of these smart, adult-oriented genre pieces show up in the same year? That hasn't happened for a while. And for the distribution machine to release both of them in the middle of summer movie season, giving the grown-ups something interesting to watch while the kids are watching Michael Bay blow shit up? Well, hell, that's unheard of, and -- one can only hope -- the beginning of a trend.