howardpark/movies

I saw Day Watch last weekend with my sister and her husband. We talked about it afterwards, and I was surprised by how much they liked it. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it had such obvious flaws, I thought they would find it as empty as I did. My beef with it was that it didn't make enough sense. It's set in an alternate reality with some supernatural phenomena, but the phenomena seem to have been pulled out of a hat, without rhyme or reason. There's a magical piece of chalk, but it has nothing to do with the magic wad of aluminum foil. And the magic aluminum foil has nothing to do with the magical otherworld known as the Gloom. And of course the Gloom has nothing to do with the chalk. Somehow, this didn't bother my sister or her husband. They simply felt that a movie like this didn't have to have any overall structure or meaning. So what if the different elements were unconnected and inconsistent? That didn't dull the sweetness of the eye candy for them one bit.

Perhaps I wanted Day Watch to be something it wasn't trying to be. But wasn't it trying to tell a story? And isn't a story just better if it makes some kind of sense? It doesn't have be a traditional, realist kind of sense, but I enjoy a story more when all its parts work together. For example, compare Day Watch with another fantasy about a demimonde of the undead, Interview with the Vampire. Whatever you may feel about the absurdity of blood-sucking in general, you have to admit that Anne Rice's story is driven by a certain logic. The story and its phenomena seem to flow naturally from her basic premise about the nature of vampirism. It's possible that Timur Bekmambetov wasn't trying for that kind of narrative logic. It's possible he actually intended to make a movie in which the main premises are incoherent and arbitrary, in which the rules are just made up as it goes along. But if those are the terms on which the movie demands to be accepted, we may as well accept that Bekmambetov simply intended to make an empty, mediocre movie. And succeeded.