Once Again, For Good Measure
What happens when your mother's breast milk carries DDT.
It wasn't that long ago that BerserkerJosh (who, sadly, no longer maintains an internet presence) and I went and saw Nochnoy Dozor despite Ian's filmfreak friend reporting that it "sucked." For those of you who didn't talk to me within the two weeks surrounding that movie, you may not know that i liked it. A lot. I did! I wasn't apprehensive to watch it again, this time with El Nino and The 'Wick, even though large scale effects focused action/horror/fantasty movies are well known for failing to deliver on the small screen, no matter how many black bars you throw on top. Yet the Dozor, known on these shores as Night Watch, still delivers.
When i first saw previews for this movie, there was a certain inability inside my brain to make sense of what i saw. See, if you watch a lot of movies, and i do, then after a while you get used to certain facts. The one that came into question was simple: if a movie has a big budget, a lot of special effects, and isn't trying to be a serious drama, then that means the movie is going to be full of actors you know. It's going to have people like Ron Eldard and Don Cheadle in medium-sized character roles and it's going to be anchored by somebody like Bruce Willis or Samuel L Jackson. Throughout the movie, you're going to notice actors that played the cancer striken 12 year old from House and 37 lawyers from Law And Order: Critical Victims Intent. Yet while watching the preview for Dozor, my brain was forced to compute with two things that have, as far as my poor knowledge of film can gather, never gone together. One is Russia. The other is big-budget movies.
Yet that's exactly what Nochnoy Dozor is. It's a sprawling action/horror movie with a bizarrely intricate engine for a plot, the first in an already over the top trilogy based on a series of Russian fantasy novels (think Siberian vampire meets Lord of the Rings, without all the gay road movie stuff), and to top it all off, it has lots and lots of characters. Putting it simply, it's a good fucking movie. It's been a long time since i saw something that could sit easily besides Predator, joining the ranks of good ole fashioned loosen yer belt and sit back with a Coke kinda-flicks, and i'll be goddamned if Night Watch doesn't belong there. The only sad thing is, and it's xenophobic at that, is that i had to wait two years for a Russian movie, full of Russian stars, to make it's way to a few American theatres and remind us what Hollywood budgets used to be for.
What happens when your mother's breast milk carries DDT.
It wasn't that long ago that BerserkerJosh (who, sadly, no longer maintains an internet presence) and I went and saw Nochnoy Dozor despite Ian's filmfreak friend reporting that it "sucked." For those of you who didn't talk to me within the two weeks surrounding that movie, you may not know that i liked it. A lot. I did! I wasn't apprehensive to watch it again, this time with El Nino and The 'Wick, even though large scale effects focused action/horror/fantasty movies are well known for failing to deliver on the small screen, no matter how many black bars you throw on top. Yet the Dozor, known on these shores as Night Watch, still delivers.
When i first saw previews for this movie, there was a certain inability inside my brain to make sense of what i saw. See, if you watch a lot of movies, and i do, then after a while you get used to certain facts. The one that came into question was simple: if a movie has a big budget, a lot of special effects, and isn't trying to be a serious drama, then that means the movie is going to be full of actors you know. It's going to have people like Ron Eldard and Don Cheadle in medium-sized character roles and it's going to be anchored by somebody like Bruce Willis or Samuel L Jackson. Throughout the movie, you're going to notice actors that played the cancer striken 12 year old from House and 37 lawyers from Law And Order: Critical Victims Intent. Yet while watching the preview for Dozor, my brain was forced to compute with two things that have, as far as my poor knowledge of film can gather, never gone together. One is Russia. The other is big-budget movies.
Yet that's exactly what Nochnoy Dozor is. It's a sprawling action/horror movie with a bizarrely intricate engine for a plot, the first in an already over the top trilogy based on a series of Russian fantasy novels (think Siberian vampire meets Lord of the Rings, without all the gay road movie stuff), and to top it all off, it has lots and lots of characters. Putting it simply, it's a good fucking movie. It's been a long time since i saw something that could sit easily besides Predator, joining the ranks of good ole fashioned loosen yer belt and sit back with a Coke kinda-flicks, and i'll be goddamned if Night Watch doesn't belong there. The only sad thing is, and it's xenophobic at that, is that i had to wait two years for a Russian movie, full of Russian stars, to make it's way to a few American theatres and remind us what Hollywood budgets used to be for.