REVIEW: Five Days To Midnight

Much like stand-off movies, I love watching time-travel movies like I love solving logic puzzles. The real draw is the riddle of the plot, and a clever story will usually trump however bad the rest of the movie turns out to be. Now that I've seen "Five Days to Midnight," I still don't really get how it all worked out, but I enjoyed most of the ride to the ambiguous and paradoxical solution. Plus, it had Timothy Hutton and Kari Matchett, both of whom I'd rather watch than most actors that pop up in these kinds of projects. I love them so much that I'd even rewatch "Demons" if someone told me that they had cameos.

Just to get it off of my chest, I refuse to refer to it as "5ive" instead of "Five." I guess using the number instead of the letter is the hip and cool way to do it, but I'm a big square and I think it's stupid. It became immediately cliched after 'the style' popped up in the "Seven" ad campaign, and it's never ever going to be cool ever again. For the last time, numbers are not pronounced with the same sound as the first letter of the name of said number. Anyone who thinks it does probably spent too much time watching "Fight Club" and getting whacked in the head by their moron friend who they convinced to fight them so they could figure out who they really were. Okay, I'm glad that's settled.

"Five Days to Midnight" starts off with the happy life of Timothy Hutton's J.T. Neumeyer, a physics professor who's celebrating his daughter Jesse's birthday with his new girlfriend Claudia (Matchett). It also happens to be the anniversary of the late Mrs. Neumeyer, and when Hutton and his daughter visit the grave, they happen upon a strange, metallic briefcase with "J.T. Neumeyer" printed on top. Inside, Hutton finds startling information: the police report on his unsolved murder, complete with photographs, suspects, and evidence, dated five days from then. Initially not sure if it's some kind of sick joke, he watches as the events detailed in the report begin to fall into place, and makes a stand to change the (probable) future. In order to make sure that the future is safe for himself, his daughter, and his mob-connected girlfriend, Hutton and Randy Quaid's Detective Sikorski hurriedly try to eliminate (read: avoid) everyone on the suspect list before it's too late.

The whole movie is set up as a relatively straightforward puzzle: there's the murder, the suspects, and the briefcase, and the script sticks to the problem doggedly enough for the audience to think that it's all going to make sense and come together in the end. The first three episodes are quite effective as potboilers, and kept me interested in finding out whodunit; the final episode of the series, though, kind of drops the ball in terms of holding the puzzle together. The rules of time travel aren't really respected, and despite the directness of the other parts, just shoots in and out of plausibility, and it seems like plot twists were tossed in for drama. For instance, just before Hutton finds out who murders him, a helicopter crashes through the ceiling, and Tom Cruise starts firing a machine gun at the National Guard! Alternate universe movies sometimes take odd turns!

I had a great theory about who did it right from the first episode, and I was way off. Of course, my idea was kind of far-fetched (although cool), but at least it made more sense than the actual ending. Since it's a mystery, I don't want to give away any spoilers, but suffice to say you're a better man than I if you can tell me how she got the briefcase full of evidence in the first place. And I don't want to hear anything about alternate timelines and parallel futures! Nothing! Got that? When it comes to time travel, alternate and parallel universes are the cheap and easy solution, because they can explain almost anything away, even if it doesn't make sense in 'our' timeline. Actually, they don't explain; they excuse. Physics-minded friends, forgive me, but when a movie cries parallel universes it's usually the equivalent of the cavalry arriving with photon blasters, or saving the plot via deus ex machina. It's hard to argue against an act of God saving the day, but it's a cheap shot, and it's going to make me groan.

The miniseries also gets a few marks off because of the overbearing style of the filmmaking. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think shooting every fifth shot at six frames per second really amps up the drama so much as makes me want to vomit at whatever strobe light I think is somewhere in my television. Flashy editing and stylistic excess are fine in movies, but they're only fine when the film actually calls for them. I didn't like "Moulin Rouge," but I can at least see that the things happening there were at the service of the rest of the movie. The story in this series was a time-travel puzzle, and it was a straightforward one at that, and every single excess that didn't need to be there only complicated matters. Complicated matters and irritated me. Irritated me and made my girlfriend go check her email instead of watching anything past the opening twenty minutes.

It's still worth a watch, but be prepared to scratch your head at the end -- and rub your eyes.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

• Timothy Hutton, Timothy Hutton. Kari Matchett, Kari Matchett. Ah, glory. Too bad he didn't bring along any other of his Nero Wolfe players.
• So, my idea was that Hutton came back from the future to murder his past self. I don't know how it would work, logically, but I think it's a cool idea. Plus, it makes exactly as much sense as the 'real' ending.
• What happened to Randy Quaid? He cycles through existing and not-existing like some kind of Schrodinger's Cat. No parts, many parts, no parts, many parts! I wish he would be more active, since he's my favorite Quaid. Come to think of it, he's lucky to be so different in appearance and style than his brother, because we all know the fate of thespian siblings that are essentially interchangeable. Right, Frank Stallone? You know what I'm talking about, Gary Swayze...
  

REVIEW: V

"V" is my absolute favorite sci-fi television series of all time. "V" rules the world so much that it also rules the world that the reptile aliens came from. If you get your hands on the new DVD sets of "V: The Original Series," "V: The Final Battle," and "V: The Series," you will have something in the range of twenty-nine hours of fantastically entertaining sci-fi pulp and soap opera.

"V" began with Kenneth Johnson's idea of telling the story of the French Resistance to the Nazi campaign during World War II. Network execs, still flabbergasted at the continuing success of stuff like "Star Wars," suggested to Johnson that maybe the Nazis...could be aliens instead. At least this is what I read when I troll websites all night long, but the original miniseries has Johnson commentary, so you can listen to him talk about it. At any rate, the French Resistance became the Human Resistance, and the Nazis became Reptilian Aliens that wore outfits that looked like Nazi uniforms and had a big swastika-ish design as their logo. In fact, the first half of the original miniseries is so completely taken with the allegory that it's almost as if the script is reaching through your TV screen and occupying your living room in the name of Der Fuhrer. The fact that just one of the characters (Leonardo Cimino) realizes that the aliens are awfully similar to Hitler's army is a little bit improbable, but since it's the same actor that played the Scary German Guy from "The Monster Squad," I let it slide.

Once the allegory initial thickness wears down, the real "V" comes out. I understand that the original intent was to have the allegory be the grounding of the show, but the budget, the cheap effects, the costumes, and the entire 1983 style relegate the show to the status of an updated Flash Gordon serial. It's really hard to take it seriously, as a viewer in 2004, when aliens wearing pointy-shouldered leotards shoot shoddily-animated laser blasts at the Tight-Blue-Jean Resistance that reacts to things that happen off-screen a lot. The real show is the soap opera, a grand and silly drama that plays out like a cross between Buck Rogers and Guiding Light. The "Final Battle" and "The Series" are wonderful fun, and are completely engrossing if you look past their quite obvious shortcomings.

The Visitors, as the aliens are called, come to earth in giant motherships that hover over major cities; keep in mind that this show pre-dates "Independence Day" by over a decade. They eventually send an envoy to speak with the people of the world: all they want is some of our water resources, in exchange for their superior technology and science. Sure, we say! Before you know it, things are getting out of hand: scientists are disappearing, children are turning into V-Youth, and eventually martial law is declared across the world, with the Visitors holding the reigns. Then, voila, one of them gets their face ripped off. EGADS! A reptile! Turns out, they're just here to harvest humans for munchies, and maybe catch some sun on a nice warm rock if they've got the time. Thus, Mike Donovon, Juliet Parrish, Ham Tyler, and bucketloads of characters -- these suckers have a lot of main characters, nineteen off the top of my head -- decide to take back the earth. Silliness and action ensue! Drama! Romance! Laserguns! Reptiles! Red Dust! Action! Action! Action!

Most of the main cast returned to work in the weekly series, and it was noted as being a pretty terrible show. The scripts are pretty dodgy, the effects range from mediocre to "Man, I could do that on my iMac," and the plot holes are large enough to fly a mothership through. We're talking the kind of show where the Resistance leaders sneak into the V Headquarters in just about every episode simply by donning a V uniform or making a fake delivery of mice to the V kitchen. Mike Donovon is in the V HQ so frequently that he gets mail delivered there. This is not serious science fiction; this is a world where enemies fall down with one punch, and stealing and flying a spaceship requires zero training -- a true pulp fantasy.

I give credit to the actors for playing their parts with what comes across as a true delight. Marc (Beastmaster) Singer is the ostensible star Resistance fighter Mike Donovon, Faye (my 1985 Girlfriend) Grant is Juliet Parrish, the leader of the Resistance, and the cult-TV stalwart plays my very favorite character, Ham Tyler. Ham Tyler is the Vietnam vet badass, the mean, grumbly Batman of the show. When an army of Resistance fighters carefully disables the security system of a Visitor stronghold, sneaks in past laser mines and alien monster dogs, Ham is the character they find sitting on top of fifty dead aliens that he strangled with one of his eyelashes while he smoked a cigar and watched Sportscenter. One time, he ran out of cigarettes, and killed 40,000 aliens with a pair of salad tongs just because he was having a nicotine fit. The actors play it straight, and the character arcs are truly what holds the show together. So much of it is silly, but the characters themselves are pretty well fleshed out despite the fact that there're, like, eight-hundred of them. They grow and change in mostly real ways, and have the same kind of conflicts that one can imagine might occur in these situations. How that works amidst pinging laser guns and poorly blue-screened explosions is beyond me, but I think it does.

I find the series immensely entertaining. I love the way that the series becomes a sci-fi Casablanca, with L.A. becoming that last free city, and Elias' restaurant looks a whole lot like Rick's Cafe. (They even have the scene where the aliens start playing their national anthem in the cafe, and Faye Grant gets everyone to sing the American National Anthem louder in defiance.) I loved the love triangle between Robin, her fast-aging hybrid daughter Elizabeth, and Kyle, the young stud rebel. I love Diana's growing, sparkly hair, and the way that she's such a complete, scenery-chewing bitch. I love the bizarre, pointy-shouldered outfits that get more and more bizarre as the series continues, even throwing in leopard-print-wearing alien dignitaries, and the commanders whose necks are strung with bling gold chains. I loved the absolutely terrible alien baby puppet, and every sequence in the V Conversion Chamber. I haven't even finished watching all of these, but when I do, I know that I'll eventually watch them all again.

If you can put aside that need for serious and really thoughtful science fiction, and can really get into the two-fisted spirit of pulp novels, give these a shot. You'll learn that fisticuffs can save the world, the cavalry always arrives right before your laser gun runs out of ammo, and true love can blossom amidst an alien invasion. And what's more fun than a world like that?

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

• I submit that Faye Grant is the most beautiful actress in the whole world.
• Despite the wide availability of easy-to-steal V spaceship/hovercrafts, Mike Donovon always seems to be riding around on a horse for no reason other than the fact that Marc Singer probably likes horses enough to have them written into the scripts.
  
• I guess this show is proof that Robert Englund can act as a character other than Freddy Krueger. I hope he ends up being remembered for a different role than either a child-murderer or a moron alien, despite the fact that he did those well.
• This show actually has "Science Fiction Consultants." I bet they're the guys that veto any science that's plausible.
  

Where are the reviews?

It's been a long time since I've updated Reviews to Astonish!, and I feel that I should hand over an explanation. The fact is, I haven't even watched a movie in a good five or six days, and to most people that's akin to not eating for five or six days. I've been very busy in the past couple weeks, and after the whole election thing I was drunk for three consecutive days, which makes it very difficult to write a review without passing out on the keyboard.

I fully intend to get back to the reviews, since my movie vault is still overflowing with the best and worst of cinema and I have a lot to say.

Just give me a few more days...