I'm On the Nightwatch and Can't Read Cyrillic

In addition to the link on ichthyosis, the same gentleman sent me one about a soon-to-be-released Russian film, Nochnoy dozor 2: Mel sudby or Day Watch. According to Ain't It Cool News, there's a trailer up at this site. The link to the trailer is broken and I don't know Cyrillic so I'm SOL. According to the guy at AICN, it's to be a series of 9 films as it's based on a trilogy of books that each have 3 stories. I'd really like to rent the first movie in the series as it sounds like it could be fun. Here's the description from a reviewer at IMDB:

Numerous dark forces lurk somewhere in a parallel world unseen to unsophisticated humans. Until the time when some of their most villainous representatives would be eager to play with their unsuspecting victims. It is, however, contrary to a certain pact between the good and the evil specifying that both good and evil doings should be controlled and approved by both parties that have established for that reason the respective teams of guardians, the Night Watch and the Day Watch.

Not only does it sound fun, but it's Russian! They gave us Eisenstein with his prediliction for editing and Battleship Potemkin, Tarkovsky with his visual poetry and Solaris, and Sokurov with his Russian Ark. So it's gotta be interesting, at the very least.

While I'm on the topic of film and bitchy...I caught part of La Femme Nikita last night and wondered why it was thought necessary to transmogrify it into Point of No Return. It didn't take long to figure out why. Obviously it had mostly to do with money. You can't put some unknown French actress's (Anne Parillaud) face all over lunch boxes and on key chains. You've gotta have someone more familiar, with a familiar name so they can be featured in People magazine and generate hype. Plus most Americans are lazy and can't be bothered to deal with subtitles. La Femme Nikita is a thoroughly Hollywood film. There's very few, if indeed any, French cultural references. You don't have to have been born and bred in France to understand what was going on. I don't think there's any big cultural subtext that, if missed by American audiences, will detract from the film. It's a fucking shoot 'em up!

OK, OK. I can see Americans disliking the French. But how about Insomnia? Yeah, Norwegians are kinda weird because they eat ludefisk but we don't dislike them. While I like Bob DeNiro, Stellan Skarsgård kicked ass. His character was much more disturbed in the original and I found it more claustrophobic, which I liked. Again, there's little cultural baggage. Not knowing anything about how Norwegians and Swedes feel about one another isn't going to ruin the film for you.

OK, next week I'm gonna have to head over to Four Star and find some foreign films.