Night Watch (2005)

  I saw part of this one a long time ago and had no idea what was going on in it.  I swear, if you miss the first ten minutes of a movie you might as well not even bother with the rest of it.  It came in the mail the other day and makes absolutely perfect sense now.

Okay, there are humans and there are Others.  Others can do any number of neat tricks, like shapeshift or see the future and they come in two flavors:  Light and Dark.  The Light Others comprise the Night Watch and the Dark Others are the Day Watch, which is slightly counterintuitive.  Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy) is a seer for the Night Watch who starts out by tracking a vampire hairdresser for unsanctioned feeding.  He finds out that a woman he bumped into on the subway is actually a catalyst for the final battle between the Light and the Dark.  He has to figure out who cursed her in order to prevent the end of the world and also keep the boy he saved from the vampire, Yegor (Dmitriy Martynov), from getting killed by the vampire's pissed off girlfriend and the forces of evil.

I have the sequel, Day Watch, in my queue already but I don't know when or if the third one is getting made.  I guess Bekmambetov is a little busy with Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter and the Wanted sequel at the moment.  Too bad, though, if Day Watch is as good as the first one.

One of my favorite things that he does is really organic-looking subtitles.  A lot of times with foreign films, it seems like the subtitles are added in afterwards by a completely separate crew which can be annoying if they're not adept at the language.  You get weird phrasing or short-cuts and it just takes you out of the movie.  Not this one.  From the font to the pacing and even the attribution, it flows almost like a comic book.

Also, just finished season 4 of Scrubs and also Band of Brothers, courtesy of Rob.  I really wasn't looking forward to the mini-series (you know how I feel about war movies) but it was incredibly well done.  I'll never watch it again, that's how well done.  Especially the episode where they liberate a concentration camp.  Jesus.  Did the casting director just bribe an Anorexia Convention to show up?  Not pleasant.  Granted, that's the point but I am not one of those people that likes to punish myself with crimes against humanity.  So, like I said, great series.  Never watching again.