timepiececlock | Entries tagged with superheroes

NIGHT WATCH, the Russian film about monsters battling monsters in a dark urban underworold, is coming to DVD on June 20th. I want to buy it. I *loved* that movie.

Here's a reposting of the review I wrote when I saw it at an indie movie theater 3 months ago.

Nightwach is the coolest vampire/occult movie I've ever seen to have such absurdly uncool main characters. Seriously. The protagonists of this show are. not. cool. They are not the supermodel bodies of Underworld. They're... they're the Firefly to Underworld's Star Trek. That's the best way I can explain it. The grit to the gloss. Only more sad than funny.

Yeah, they do have cool superpowers...

But mostly they have flashlights.

The flashlights end up being a lot more useful than the superpowers at times.

You know how you watch Dead Like Me and think "Wow, it sucks being a grim reaper." ? You see Nightwatch and you're like "Wow, it sucks being an immortal superhero with magical powers."

The movie wasn't quite what I expected but it ended up being completely fascinating to me. It also reminded me a bit of the original Highlander film. The very first one. With all the romanticism sucked out.

There's a chance you might not like it as much as I did. It was very dark, bloody at times, and the fights were rather disorienting (there's an actual characterization/plot reason for the battles to be so visually disorienting, but I don't want to go into detail about it), and the people weren't very sexy or very huggable. However, if you like monsters, fantasy, magic, vampires, psychics, spaceships, The X Files, or any other of a hundred sci-fi related things I expect everyone on my friends list likes.... YOU WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE.

It's Underworld, but smarter. It's Constantine, but grittier. Keanu's morose and world-weary John Constantine's got nothing on Anton. On the litmus test of moral ambiguity, Constantine's a choir boy in comparison. Not cause Anton's evil or anything, but... you just have to watch it.

Also? The subtitles were cool. I don't know how else to describe them except cool. They really utilized computer graphics to make the subtitles a part of the film. There's this one scene very early where a kid is swimming under water and bleeding out his nose. A voice calls to him and the subtitles are red, then they twist up like blood into the water near his face. COOL. And never so much that it got annoying.

FINAL VERDICT: A-. Top quality fantasy/horror film, one of the best I've seen in a long time (probably the best I've seen since LOTR). It's weird, it's dark, it's visually arresting and it's foreign. It's creepy and I want the sequel very badly. I also want fanfic. I'm regretting not taking Russian in college because I'm not going to find much fanfic, I can tell.

Review continues here, with spoilers: (They had me at the Buffy gag)

My friend and I were all excited to see X3 last night, but it was sold out. On the way over, though, Friend K and I discussed how valuable (or not) freezing stuff would be in battle. I brought up things like freezing people's blood in their veins, or freezing their BRAIN. Most of your body is water anyway, after all. Then the discussion came around to "Oh, you could freeze someone's EYEBALLS."

She agreed that was horrible and asked me to stop grossing her out, which then led to me pondering the question of if it was possible to freeze someone's eyes and then thaw them out without damaging the nerves. Cause they're just organs, right?

So if you had superpowers to freeze stuff, you could freeze someone's eyeballs, and it might be possible they could thaw out and eventually see again.

Friend K told me that this was the weirdest statement she'd ever heard come out of my mouth. I agree it's pretty odd, but I personally think I can do better. ::crosses fingers::

Nightwach is the coolest vampire/occult movie I've ever seen to have such absurdly uncool main characters. Seriously. The protagonists of this show are. not. cool. They are not the supermodel bodies of Underworld. They're... they're the Firefly to Underworld's Star Trek. That's the best way I can explain it. The grit to the gloss. Only more sad than funny.

Yeah, they do have cool superpowers...

But mostly they have flashlights.

The flashlights end up being a lot more useful than the superpowers at times.

You know how you watch Dead Like Me and think "Wow, it sucks being a grim reaper." ? You see Nightwatch and you're like "Wow, it sucks being an immortal superhero with magical powers."

The movie wasn't quite what I expected but it ended up being completely fascinating to me.

There's a chance you might not like it as much as I did. It was very dark, bloody at times, and the fights were rather disorienting (there's an actual characterization/plot reason for the battles to be so visually disorienting, but I don't want to go into detail about it), and the people weren't very sexy or very huggable. However, if you like monsters, fantasy, magic, vampires, psychics, spaceships, The X Files, or any other of a hundred sci-fi related things I expect everyone on my friends list likes.... YOU WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE.

It's Underworld, but smarter. It's Constantine, but grittier. Keanu's morose and world-weary John Constantine's got nothing on Anton. On the litmus test of moral ambiguity, Constantine's a choir boy in comparison. Not cause Anton's evil or anything, but... you just have to watch it.

Also? The subtitles were cool. I don't know how else to describe them except cool. They really utilized computer graphics to make the subtitles a part of the film. There's this one scene very early where a kid is swimming under water and bleeding out his nose. A voice calls to him and the subtitles are red, then they twist up like blood into the water near his face. COOL. And never so much that it got annoying.

And now, for the spoilery parts: ( They had me at the Buffy gag )

FINAL VERDICT: A-. Top quality fantasy/horror film, one of the best I've seen in a long time (probably the best I've seen since LOTR). It's weird, it's dark, it's visually arresting and it's foreign. It's creepy and I want the sequel very badly. I also want fanfic. I'm regretting not taking Russian in college because I'm not going to find much fanfic, I can tell.

((This movie also reminded me a bit of the original Highlander film. The very first one. With all the romanticism sucked out.))

watch the trailer

Current Music: I want the OST for this movie

My roommate K and I just got into a long argument about what genre the movie Signs falls into, and how one defines a "horror" movie. I said a horror movie has to scare you and has to have conventional horror things like monsters or excessive gore. She said it has to follow a specific "horror movie" plot structure (which in her opinion is epitomized by Friday the 13th-- I think you have to also consider older horror films like The Birds when you're talking about traditional horror film structure.)

I said that's not the only way to judge a horror film, because by her definition of plot structure, Signs is a horror movie: as it follows a small group of isolated people being terrorized by deadly monsters, and their area of safety gets smaller and smaller, and there's crazy animals, and people are dying around them, and there's creepy children, and they have to survive the night and battle the monsters. It also makes you jump and shriek with fright. She said it's a science fiction movie-- I said it may have aliens, but the aliens were so off-screen they could have been replaced by any other farm-terrorizing monster and the plot would be exactly the same. They don't interact with the threat in any kind of science fiction way-- the way they defeat the aliens is even more reminiscent of horror than of science fiction: they find it's magical weakness, in this case liquid H20, and use it to fight the monsters off. From the family's point of view, the fact that they're aliens and not Boogiemen is incidental, academic to their situation. Signs doesn't follow the plot structure of a science fiction film, it follows the plot structure of a horror movie. But-- it's about aliens, not monsters. And main characters don't die along the way-- only the dog dies (although the animal going crazy is a very typical horror movie thing), and also people off-screen that you can't see, only hear about on their television and radio. So what is it? She says it's a thriller--- but does it follow the plot structure of a thriller, as by her argument that plot structure defines genre?

No. It has the plot structure of a horror movie. Silence of the Lambs, which also came up in discussion, has the plot structure of a thriller, but it has enough gore and is frightening enough to be called a slasher horror movie.

There's also the basic question: Do you go to get scared? I go to an M. Night Shayamalan movie expecting to get scared. Not every scene, but I expect it to be creepy or unsettling or to make me jump at least once. So what does that mean?

My whole point in this argument was that you can't say archetypal plot structure is the only way to define a film's genre. Movies can have the elements of a horror film but the plot structure of a thriller-- like War of the Worlds (recent), or vice versa, as with Signs. You have to look at the elements of the story and characters as well as the plot structure to categorize a film in one particular genre or another.

Blade Trinity was fun, though. Certainly re-watchable, whereas in the last five years I've had no desire at all to see Blade a second time.

Although, the ending of B:Trinity left me with a big WTF?. I watched the extended/unrated edition, and I guess they changed the last scene from the theatrical edition, but it didn't make any sense and even after talking to my roommate about it (she saw the theatrical version), she didn't know what to make of it either.

Rewatched Van Hellsing tonight, we were keeping it from Netflix because my mom hadn't watched it yet. In rewatching it, I decided it was better in some ways than I gave it credit for the first time I watched it.

Watching it a second time also compounded my main praise from the previous experience: DRACULA! He was the coolest thing about this movie. His clothes were cool; his accent (while sometimes amusing simply because I amuse easily) managed to be pretty cool and avoid most of the inherent silly-inducing clicheness; and his hair kicked ass. Really. I take back my previous comment-- his hair was the coolest thing about this movie. There's very few men in the world that can wear long, iron-straight hai-- in a half pony-tail-- with a hair clip-- and still look totally masculine, cool, and threatening. His make-up artist/costumers should be proud. And it wasn't like he was gorgeous or anything-- he was kind of normal-attractive in attractiveness of the face. But he could wear that hair and wear that cape.

If this actor with this costume had done the Dracula on Buffy, the Buffster would have been evilfied right quick and without complaint.

Mystique is the ultimate minion.

She's like--- the most perfect 1st lieutenant ever. The FE wishes it had its own Mystique.

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Peter Wingfield's in this movie! How come no one told me Peter Wingfield's in this movie???

Hn. American accent too. odd.

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I still have the opinion I had last movie: Rogue and Wolverine have entirely too much UST. In three or four years they'll have solved her touchy-problem and be doing it like rabbits.

That said, Bobby was really sweet, and much more endearing in this movie than the last.

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So nice when kids and teenagers in movies actually behave and react like kids and teenagers, even with superpowers.

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( Eleven spoilery comments )

I want my own Mystique. Someone get me one for next Christmas?

All in all, vastly more entertaining than the last, and with a much more interesting plot.

I expect Matrix 2 to blow it out of the water, and Return of the Ring to blast them both off the planet.