[Free stuff at bottom of post!!!]
MosNews has a story on the release of Ночной Дозор (Night Watch) hitting US theaters on February 17. The director, Timur Bekmambetov is a native of Kazakhstan who studied in Tashkent and worked in Uzbekistan’s theater and film industries. The movie will first come out in LA, New York, and San Francisco before hitting smaller markets. It will be in Russian with English subtitles, meaning there’s an outside chance that the arthouse crowd will stumble into something that feels quite a bit like a Hollywood movie that takes place on Russian soil.
Bekmambetov, 44, a former engineer who became an advertising guru after the fall of the Soviet government, said he received some of his most valuable lessons as a director from the prolific B-movie producer and director Roger Corman.
A 2000 film proposed to the director by Corman about women gladiators titled “The Arena” taught Bekmambetov how to get the most out of a small production budget and “helped me to feel and taste real filmmaking,” he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
Anyone who gives a nod to the director of such classics as The Wasp Woman is alright in my book.
The movie feels American in some other ways as well.
The Kazakhstan native also has an intuition for Hollywood’s commercial side. Even before the deal with Fox Searchlight, Bekmambetov was using product placement in “Night Watch,” a revenue-generating technique that is relatively new even to other Western countries. Specific brands are mentioned in the book on which the film is based, Bekmambetov explained. “Brands are kind of gods for us,” he said.
Product shots, including one of the film’s protagonist making a cup of Nescafe coffee, have been criticized by Russian film purists. But the director said they were meant to be provocative. “The money is a bonus,” he said.
The sequel, Day Watch, recently came out in Russia, and Fox Searchlight has picked up the rights to both it, and the final installment of the trilogy, Dusk Watch. MosNews says that the final film will be produced in English and may be filmed in part in the US. Additionally, he has met with Universal and it looks like he will be making some movies in Hollywood.
Bekmambetov recently traveled to California to meet with the studio about the third film and Universal pictures for another film based on a comic book.
The new deals have brought bigger budgets. The special effects made possible by the computer-generated imagery (CGI) industry require less of the improvisation learned from Bekmambetov’s mentor, Corman, but have given the director a Hollywood brand of cynicism. “I think CGI’s mission is for me to make them richer,” he said.
Contemplating his future work in the U.S., the director considers the use of product placement a common cultural ground. “Moscow has Ikea, the same brands of Russian vodka are here and there. Brands make the world global,” Bekmambetov said.
Bekmambetov’s first English-language film will be Mark Millar’s Wanted.
Check out Fox Searchlight’s Night Watch page and visit Apple for the trailer.
If my two cents are worth anything, I suggest you go see this movie if you haven’t gotten a chance to already. There are even free screenings of the movie in a lot of cities. If you go to the Fox Searchlight page for the movie, look for the free screening link near the top. I’ve gone ahead and reserved myself a couple spots for a screening on the 21st here in Seattle.
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I watched Nochnoi Dozor a long time ago in Tashkent (and made a point to buy a copy of it before I moved back home recently) and I was surprised actually how much I enjoyed it. I second Nathan’s suggestion that you give it a shot even if it’s not the kind of movie you would usually go to. I have never been interested in Hollywood movies of that particular genre, but Nochnoi Dozor is so Russian, so different than our movies. If for nothing else, see it for the incredible film shots of Moscow at night and the awesome cast that it features… I really like Habenskii (the actor in the lead role) and this movie made him pretty much the hottest young actor in Russian cinema (if you can find it, Bednie Rodstvenniki is a really interesting Russian take on something very similar to “Everything is Illuminated”).
If for no other reason, if you’re interested in the culture of the 30 and under generation in the entire Russian speaking world, you pretty much have to watch this movie because as far as I can tell everyone in that demographic has seen it.
The second movie has a Tamerlaine segment in which he speaks Kazakh. Uzbeks are probably not very happy with Bekmambetov.
The second movie had the slickest trailer I have ever seen in my life–it outhollywooded Hollywood in production value and in attention paid to advertising.
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