KZBlog

Or The Night Watch and Day Watch movies and books are really cool; you should buy them now

My wife and I went to buy a telephone. The store we got it from was running a contest in which if you spend between 5 and 10 thousand tenge you get a free DVD, if you spend between 10 and 20 thousand you get a fan, etc up to like 50 thousand which got you an air conditioner or a vacuum cleaner (I forget which but I wanted to write down the whole list to get an idea of values). Our phone cost slightly less than 10 thousand so we got the DVD, Day Watch, the sequel to Night Watch. There will be a third and the whole trilogy, I read after Day Watch came out, is supposed to prove that Russian films are now as good as Soviet films were and as good as American films are.

When Night Watch came out, the poster and trailer made it look like a really stupid horror movie. Some super-hero with lots of weapons fighting nasty creatures–Van Helsing reprise. Then I heard that there was going to be a trilogy and that an American studio was helping out. The third will be filmed in America. Then, I saw the trailer for Day Watch. Hands-down the best trailer ever made. It strings different scenes from the whole movie into one conversation. Really original, sparkling, sets the mood for a surreal fantasy movie. Finally, I read an interview with the director, one Timur Bekmambetov, who is Kazakh. He was going on about the innovations in this film that hadn’t been done in Russian film, the attention it was getting from the world. And then he focused in on product placement. Russian directors, he said, were above crass-commercialism, but product placement was now a standard feature of American movies, and a way to make money in order to make better films, pay competitive salaries, etc… At least the way the interviewer edited the interview, it sounded like product placement was the key innovation in Day Watch. I was intrigued and felt that perhaps I should see these films to see what the fuss was about. Along came my free chance. Reader, I loved it. It was fun, funny, intriguing, and action-packed, with emotion and enigma. It had Timurlane and a parrot who was turned into a killer, easily defeated because of course parrots are sensitive to cold! You didn’t need to have seen the first one to get the second one, though clearly having seen the first one might add to the experience. Though we did stop the film every scene to try to figure out what was going on, this was more due to the fact that I don’t speak fluent Russian and Assel doesn’t speak fluent fantasy. Between the two of us, we did pretty good (I later watched it with subtitles and found that we were 90% on).

At this point, I turned to Wikipedia to try to get the background information that watching the first film would probably have given me. From reviews of Night Watch, it sounds like this is not the case. Many agree that it was violent and very, very hard to follow, plot-wise. Mostly it was just showing off that Russia can do Matrix-like special effects. Day Watch also suffered from this a bit, but at least we knew what was going on. From Wikipedia, I got my background—who these mystical “Others” are and what the “Gloom” they kept talking about was. I also found out that they were once books. So I picked up the first book. As it turns out, the first and second movies are based on the first book, so I was able to follow it pretty well. The books are enjoyable, though dryer. The books focus more on philosophy and ethics, which at times is interesting and at times is Star Wars-esque—boring, repetitive, simplistic. The movies take two main characters and put them in a more emotionally-charged relationship than the books do, but ultimately an artificial one as well because there isn’t the background to their relationship i.e. it tells, but doesn’t show. The books on the other hand, emphasize a different relationship and a different aspect of one of the main characters, and follows through a bit more.

Halfway through the first book, I realized that soon we were taking a trip to the US and I would need books to read. So I bought the third book, the bookstore being out of the second book (This was before I got to the part in the first book where I understood nothing that was going on and gave up—for the moment). And lo and behold, the third book promises to be set on a train from Moscow to Almaty. A little digging and we discover that the author, Sergey Lukyaninko, though having a Belorussian or Ukrainian last name, was born in Kazakhstan!

Then doing a little digging to try to find a summary in English of the first book, so I have something to work with while reading, I discover fan pages, a role-playing game, A License to Drink Blood, and the author’s LJ.

What I love is, this guy writes some fantasy novels—of which he has written many. One series gets picked up to be made into movies in Russia. For some reason, through some series of events, these movies are to be the best movies ever made in Russia. They get the attention of US studios; they are to be released in the US. The novels are being translated into English and released in the US. This guy is a hundred times more famous—and one hopes richer—than he could have imagines. And what does he put on his blog?

His Visited Countries Map