Daywatch

A few more or less known worldwide:


The Cranes are Flying (1957) Golden Palm and Special Mention at Cannes.

War Peace (1968) Oscar 1969
Still holds the record as the longest commercially released feature film (at 500+ min) and most expensive movie ever (at $540+ mil adjusted).

Moscow does not believe in tears (1979) Oscar 1981

The aforementioned Burnt By The Sun (1994) Oscar 1995, Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. The sequel is currently in production.



And more recent ones worth mentioning:

Barber of Siberia 1998
From the director of Burnt by the Sun. Most expensive russian movie to date ($35mil, 7 times the budget of NightWatch).

9th Company 2005
Last year's war blockbuster set in Afganistan, with $25+mil in box office, highest grossing russian movie... until the release of Daywatch on January 1st this year. Trailer



Now, none of these are my favourite movies (not because they aren't good... which they are; just not that big a fan). But these are either some of the biggest or most critically acclaimed movies, that you may be able to find. If you happen to be really interested in soviet cinema, I could you give a long ass list of incredible movies, but many of them would be hard to understand to any foreigner and I'm guessing many of them were never released outside Russia. Btw, the iMDb boards for the movies above might also be a good place to start your education. I saw a lot of good recomendations there.
 
x170es,
Thanks for the hook-up. Pardon the ignorance.

Just wondering, can you list off some of your favorites. I like to look outside the critically acclaimed area.
 
Sure thing:

The Girls
Pokrov Gates
Watch Out for the Automobile
Kidnapping Caucassian Style, or Shurik's New Adventures
Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures
12 Chairs
Office Romance
Gentlemen of Fortune
Irony of Fate
Garage
Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Occupation

Wow, who would of thought iMDb had all of those... and look at the ratings :cheesy:

These would be some of my favourites. Actually... make that nation's favourites, because each of these movies is a true classic, each gets aired several times a year and somehow never gets boring (i.e. Irony of Fate over the years has become the official New Year celebration movie - you can find it on several channels every December 31st). Also, all of these movies happen to be comedies, at least partly. Perhaps it says something about the mentality of people living behind the iron curtain or something, but it's 4:40 am, I'm about to hit the sack and not in the mood to analyze the phenomenon. Let's just put it this way... these are some of the most beloved russian films. They may not be filmmaking landmarks or "masterpieces" by Tarkovsky or Bondarchuk, but if you want to try and understand what true soviet cinema was or what life in USSR was like....

You know what, screw that. These are just trully kind, smart, human, funny and touching films, that lots of people happen to love. There. Now, I'm really tired and heading to bed...
 
i took russian and soviet film my last semester.
Here's a few i know we watched:

Urga
The Theif
Little Vera
Strike
The Mirror
Carnival night
Deserter
Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
The House I live in
Ivan the Terrible
There was a lad

I'm sure there was more and those are NOT in chorological order.

Russian cinema was in serious trouble in the late 1990's though, due to the fact that they had no modernized theaters (they all still sat thousands). In 1998, domestic gross for Russian movies was so small they didn't even record it. I don't know how daywatch did, but until nightwatch, LOTR3 was the highest grossing film in russia to date. Russians were avid movie goers until 1998 (from around 1920) averaging about 15-20 movies gone to per capita each year.
 
hybridtheory said:
Russian cinema was in serious trouble in the late 1990's though, due to the fact that they had no modernized theaters (they all still sat thousands). In 1998, domestic gross for Russian movies was so small they didn't even record it. I don't know how daywatch did, but until nightwatch, LOTR3 was the highest grossing film in russia to date. Russians were avid movie goers until 1998 (from around 1920) averaging about 15-20 movies gone to per capita each year.
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Well, not really. Late 1990s is when the situation got normal, more or less. 1989-1990 is when cinema in this country simply disappeared. With the fall of USSR there were no working theatres left, no distribution channels, no legal home video, nothing. It's when bootlegging became the only available way for people to actually watch movies. It was so huge, you can't even try to imagine.
Until about 1994, when first distributors started appearing, you could only watch Shwartznegger/Stallone/Van-Damme (for some reason it was their movies that were the most popular, heads and shoulders above the rest - people coming out of the Iron Curtain age wanted spectacle, they wanted violence, sex, explosions, money, sex, violence... ) on bootlegged VHS, that were available EVERYWHERE.
Then, when first legal copies became available, distributors were scratching their heads as to why noone was buying their stuff, that was priced 3 times higher. For the colorful VHS cases? Huh, but that bootlegged cassete has 2 Lethal Weapons, not just one?..
Of course, it got better as time passed, prices normalized, dubbing, video and sound quality got good enough to justify the price difference over street stuff... you know how it goes. But people's mentality never really changed since. The bootlegging is still big here and many still prefer to buy a 5-in-1 or 10-in-1 DVD for half the price of a legal copy that has 5-10 times less entertainment on it... *sigh*

But we were talking about cinema. The first movie I saw in a theatre in Russia (not in USSR) was Lost World. What was it, 1997? About that time foreign movies started getting wide releases, theatres were reconstructed and everything got back on track. Lost World I think was the first Dolby release and the first really big premiere with the props, decorations, makers present and stuff.
It was still slow, though, back then. Slow and little compared to home video market. Many movies went straight to video, others took many months to get to theatres after their initial releases. Simply because there weren't enough screens available. And noone cared to build more, because like I said it was all about home video.

(Which makes the Barber of Siberia (1998), that I mentioned above, all the more interesting affair. It was obvious they would never make the $35mil budget back, but Mihalkov still went for it. It made $2,6mil... Noone else here had a budget as big since then. Though, today they would actually have a chance at the box office)

1997-1999 also marked the reincarnation of the russian filmmaking. Several titles were realesed that became cult classics and big success at both the theatrical and home video markets. Since then it was only getting better. Hundreds of theatres were built and new ones appear almost every week. And to address hybridtheory's point about modern theatres - those big old school halls that sit 1500-2000+ people are still (and have always been) the most popular ones. I know I prefer to see King-Kong in a company of 2 thousand people to watching it on a tiny screen in some multiplex. Big foreign releases now easily make 10+ millions, big local releases, as the Daywatch demonstrated, are capable to cross the 30mil mark (though, to be fair, that would have to be poo pooing huge release - stuff like Turkish Gambit, 9th Company and Daywatch that all made over 20mil was practically EVERYWHERE for months and people flew to theatres when they were finally released).
Now, 7mil people that watched Daywatch in theatres is still nothing compared to the numbers of any big soviet release... but it's only getting better, doesn't seem to slow down.


Pheew, there... Not sure if anyone is going to read all that, but I was just bored, felt like writing a term paper.
 
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xl70e3 said:
Pheew, there... Not sure if anyone is going to read all that, but I was just bored, felt like writing a term paper.
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And it was absolutely fascinating! Thanks for taking the time to type it.
 
sorry to bring this thread up, but where did you get your copy of daywatch? Amazon doesn't carry it. lol

I've watched Nightwatch 3 times since I got it. It's a pretty sweet film.
 
dj200423 said:
sorry to bring this thread up, but where did you get your copy of daywatch? Amazon doesn't carry it. lol

I've watched Nightwatch 3 times since I got it. It's a pretty sweet film.
Click to expand...

Search the "World Wide" web. I'll have to ask Spidey for the details.
 
dj200423 said:
sorry to bring this thread up, but where did you get your copy of daywatch? Amazon doesn't carry it. lol

I've watched Nightwatch 3 times since I got it. It's a pretty sweet film.
Click to expand...

ebay.
 
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