elvindill

Well, I watched Day Watch with my American girlfriend in a St. Petersburg cinema a few hours ago, and we both enjoyed it. The relatively huge success of of the first episode obviously allowed the producers to pump more cash into this second installment, and it shows throughout the film. The CG sequences are slicker and more impressive, and so is pretty much everything else, including the consistently confident directing. Even the fact that the premise is so annoyingly weak doesn't spoil the fun as much as it did in the first film.

As a Russian though, the thing I liked best was the unmistakable Russian-ness of the movie. As far as film-making is concerned, I don't normally mean that as a compliment, but with Day Watch it is different. While it can definitely appeal to a wider international audience (my girlfriend, albeit a bit of a Russophile, is an indication of that), it is at the same time literally packed with all sorts of clever wordplay and references to various realities of Russian life, ranging from political satire to hilariously blatant product placement.

Even though I can enjoy a less obnoxious art-house film every now and then, on the whole I prefer clever commercial movies, and Day Watch falls into that category very neatly.

We weren't there first but we have certainly produced a perfect mockumentary.

I've seen it twice now, and it was even better on a second viewing. The perfect timing of each scene, the meticulous attention to every tiny detail, the amazing amateur cast (none of the actors have appeared in a film before; watch out especially for the old lady who plays a retired nurse reminiscing about one of the main characters), the deadpan voice-over, the humour, and even the surprisingly moving tragic scenes - if you know anything at all about Russia, there's everything to guarantee that you'll love this film.

Suffice it to say that yesterday I spent an equivalent of 13 dollars on a licensed DVD copy of the film. I could have got a pirated one for 1/4 of the price, and like most Russians, I usually do, but the makers of this film deserve all the money it can make them.

While Soderbergh's Solaris may well be a work of art in its own right, I certainly pity those who haven't read the book or at least seen Tarkovsky's 1972 original adaptation, which is a lot more faithful to Lem's novel in its scope, if not in its vision. Soderbergh has managed to leave out just about everything that could justify the title (as Lem himself put it, if he had set out to write a book about space romance, he would have called it Love in Outer Space, not Solaris). So if you want to know the story, go and read the novel.

That said, I enjoyed Jeremy Davis as Snow, and the score is very good.