Timur Bekmambetov has made a movie for Universal starring world religious figure, Angelina Jolie. I call her that because all over the planet, legions of men, and perhaps some women, meditate on her image while having sex. But this posting is not about Her, holy be Her Name.
Bekmambetov’s movie, “Wanted”, will come out this summer and has an excellent chance of not being very good. I say that with no inside information and no pleasure and with the hope that I will be proven wrong. Hollywood has a history of hiring foreign directors because they made a good film with a quirky and interesting approach and then feeding their American film through the corporate stamping plant that makes all the aptly named product the mediocre same.
Bekmambetov got on Hollywood’s radar by making “Night Watch”, an action fantasy film with great looking effects, for under 5 million bucks. I’ve seen both “Night Watch” (NW) and its sequel “Day Watch”(DW) twice. I liked them better on the second viewing, which interests me. The Russian effects are well done and clever. In NW the dark vortex is made up of black birds and wind. In DW the 2nd. Level of the Gloom consists of a dim blurred human world and lots of buzzing mosquitoes. A car drives impossibly across the glass curtain wall of a high rise hotel. What looks like a toy ball starts to destroy Moscow.
This is all good stuff but what really interests me are other things.
(More coming)
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