Nochnoi Dozor

So I saw Nightwatch (Nochnoi Dozor)



It was hotly anticipated by the fine folks over at Ain't It Cool News. And given their ten year relationship with giving me the heads up on cool shit like Battle Royal, Versus, and Titanic, which it turns out is really good, if you haven't seen it, queue it, you won't regret it.



So I went to see Night Watch. And I thought with all the badass SFX in the trailer that it wouldn't be so...oh, what's the word? Foreign. Well with all the badasss SFX it's still pretty foreign. I like foreign films, but I like all the auteur stuff. The genre breaking events of the French and German New Waves. Lots of experiments and prolific output by a zeitgeist crew of the young directors of the era, a lot to hang my hat on. This was directed by some Russian dude. And it's just, so foreign, in that way where foreign directors have no concept of story structure? Stuff just kind of keeps kind of happening at a medium pace until the credits signal that you have reached the end, because emotion couldn't have indicated it for you if credits didn't exist. I'm not expecting a Syd Field wet dream like Panic Room where Jodie Foster ends up in the closet at precisely 29 minutes into the movie and gets out precisely 29 minutes before the end, but there's another driving passion for the Godard's and the Herzog's of this world, so they aren't driven by structure, but they're driven by...something.

Anyway when, thankfully, the credits rolled, I became transfixed. Did you know that Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) was made by:

41 Aleksandr's
29 Aleksei's
28 Sergei's
29 Andrei's
21 Vladimir's
20 Dmitri's
16 Igor's
14 Maxim's
13 Konstantin's
11 Yuri's
10 Nikolai's
9 Viktor's
8 Vladislav's
5 Anatoli's
3 Boris's
and
1 Mukhtar

In a pear tree.

I took the time to count, that's a reasonably accurate number. Isn't that crazy? I know if there's one, ONE other fucking Adam in the room I'm ready to tear my hair out after the fifth time I say "what?" and it's not me.

Oh, and Night Watch is about Vampires. Like that isn't annoying. Because there's still so many avenues to explore in that fertile genre. You know what's funny "revisionist" Vampire tales, where Garlic doesn't work but everything else does - oooooooh, that's some outside the box thinking. Or a cross doesn't work but everything else does. WOW! You've re-invented the genre.