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All right, ramblers...
Did you know Stephen Dorff, Robert De Niro, and Patrick Swayze were originally slated to act in 'Boondock Saints'? I can see Dorff being a Macmanus twin. Um. I can see... Um. Um, okay, sorry, I can't get over PATRICK SWAYZE WTF?!?! (Yeah, you caught me out, I was mixing up my Roberts the first time I posted this.) Also, I watched School Ties, which starred, like, everybody before they were anybody. It wasn't earth-shattering or anything, let's say, and I think I will add 'boarding school movies' to my interest list regardless.
"Smokey Joe's cafeeee..."
Hehehe.
In O12 news: OY. WTF I KNEW IT I KNEW IT WTF. Scroll down, last item. Dear O12, please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck...
...And now to the meat of this post.
You guys remember this? Bitches, I finally watched it. I finally got my grubby little hands on a copy and watched it. Now unless 'City On Fire' was based on something and something else is based on 'Kaante', I can safely say I'm all Reservoir Dogged out. And no, the 'Samurai Jack' lampoon doesn't count, if only because I've only ever watched the first four minutes. [Smacks Kazaa.] TOIL HARDER.
So yeah, Kaante is based on Reservoir Dogs is based on City On Fire. Right? Right, and I've watched all three of them and am going to indulge in geekery of a different sort than what this LJ usually offers.
Movie geekery and spoilers be behind that thar LJ-cut, arrr! Click (or don't), 'cos I know you're curious as I was about how one would incorporate dance numbers into a movie like 'Reservoir Dogs'. Visuals included.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
The Mr White character is the one in the white suit, and props to him. Amitabh Bachchan was the best thing in the movie. Props to you, sir.
I watched 'Kaante' purely for the 'Reservoir Dogs' references, so maybe I'm excused if the first half of 'Kaante' completely bored me. We didn't start Reservoir Dogging until halfway through the movie, warehouses and stomach wounds and all. (Sunil Shetty didn't freak out half as much as Tim Roth did, though.)
'Kaante' is a jumble of genres that you wouldn't think would mix, but hey, this is Bollywood and Bollywood makes magical things happen. You'd think 'Kaante' was an action/crime flick, what with that opening scene that is o_Oingly similar to the opening scene of The Usual Suspects, but suddenly there's a terminally ill wife, a mentally retarded sister, and a histrionic score that starts playing when anyone so much as gets a paper cut. Hello, soap opera. And then--because this is Bollywood--it's suddenly a music video.
All this is packaged in the very shiny sheen of techno-action movies a la the new 'Italian Job' and 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Everything has this hard yellow glow and there is an (over)abundance of camera tricks (slo-mo, trailing afterimage, etc). 'Kaante' is a B-movie giftwrapped in A-movie cinematography. 'Kay, well, I thought the foley artists went overboard sometimes. The punches sound way brutal.
It isn't a straight plot lift. Mr White & Co. aren't being used as templates either. It isn't exact that this character is that guy in 'Dogs'; it's more of a jumble. For example, Lucky Ali plays a guy called Bali, who steps into Pink's shoes when he confronts the White character about there being a rat among them, but also goes Blond when he starts torturing the cop. Sometimes characters come out of the left field, like White's terminally ill wife (and it never says what she's sick of) and Andy the software analyst who lost custody of his kid. Um. Yeah. We see more of the guys' personal lives than we do in 'Dogs'. 'Kaante' plays as a tragedy, while 'Reservoir Dogs' had a touch of something different. Also, although 'Kaante' was filmed in New York, the film says it's set in LA. Which, um. I mean hello, New York and LA? You can't casually switch one for the other, they're so different.
I have a strong suspicion that there's a lot of 'The Usual Suspects' in the plot as well, but seeing as I haven't finished watching that movie, I'll let that go. In fact, here's something interesting: the detective Bali tortures is named McQuarrie. Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for 'The Usual Suspects'.
"Speaking of scripts," you may say, "how do you know Sanjay Gupta didn't rip off Ringo Lam? How are you so sure he ripped off Quentin Tarantino?"
The subtitles for this scene tipped me off:
Then the subtitles for this scene really tipped me off:
"Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?" --Mr Blond (Michael Madsen) from 'Reservoir Dogs'
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
'Kay, so if you've read down this far, you're probably one of the people who knows that one of Tarantino's trademarks is the trunk shot. There's a camera in the trunk, looking up at whoever's opening it. You can even see this in From Dusk Till Dawn, which QT wrote but did not direct. The honor of that went to his husband, Robert Rodriguez.
Here's the 'Reservoir Dogs' trunk shot:
In 'Kaante', the trunk shot has been replaced by this:
They didn't have this McQuarrie in the car. As you can see from the subtitles, Sanjay Dutt brought him to the warehouse and dumped him there, in... some box, or something. Naw, seriously, it's just some box. Or something. They do the same trick, though, that when the guys reach down to pull the detective out of the box, their hands covers the camera lens in that cool, mess-with-your-head way.
And now, the ear-cutting scene! What ear-cutting scene? No ear-cutting scene! Which is good, because that would have been too obvious. McQuarrie did get punched around, but he got to keep his ear. Instead, they hung him in a scene lifted straight out of The Quick and the Dead:
And then they shot him dead, quickly.
I had predicted a high-kick dance number for the torture scene. Alas, I was wrong. There were no high kicks, just zoom-ins of the actors staring warily at each other while a tense song plays and the subtitled lyrics ominously declares things like:
There's Mr White at the top, there's the Pink/Blond hybrid below him.
So. No ear-cutting broadway extravaganza.
There was a "yay, we're going to be rich soon" broadway extravaganza, though, which I guess will have to do.
I gotta say, they dance a hella lot better than Mr Blond. The music was pretty catchy, too.
In terms of cinematography, 'City On Fire' is the opposite of 'Kaante'. This isn't surprising, considering the latter came out in 2002 and the former in 1987. 'City On Fire' is typical cheese noir, complete with girlfriend troubles and cheesetastic saxophone 'lonely city' music. You guys remember that lady who does the ethnic yodelling shtick in sad scenes (e.g. Troy, 25th Hour, Gladiator, etc.)? She's the modern saxophone. Someone gets shot, someone dies, someone realizes their shoes don't match their purse, and suddenly they get their woe on in the background like "WOAAAAAOAAAAAOOO!"
In 'Kaante' and 'Reservoir Dogs', you pretty much feel for every character, or you're supposed to. In 'City On Fire', the heart of the movie is with the Mr Orange character, played by Chow Yun Fat. It was interesting for me seeing him in this role, because usually he's so solemn and suchlike, but in this role he's talkative and a scoundrel. Like 'Kaante', 'City On Fire' laid on the emotional baggage reeeaaally thick. Tarantino pared down plenty. You could say 'Kaante' gave back to the 'City On Fire' story what Tarantino took away from it: the soap opera. 'Kaante' brought it back to its beginnings.
I don't have screencaps from 'City On Fire' because the movie's already been zipped on a CD and I don't feel like unzipping the damn thing 'cos that'd take way long. So. Um, CityOnFire!Orange had a pissy girlfriend and, because the movie was all about Orange, the CityOnFire!Dogs' characters were not as developed. Mmmkay.
'City On Fire' bored me kind of all the way through, except for this awesome scene. In this scene, there's an arms deal going on. Chow Yun Fat, pretending to be a villain, goes into this arms deal with a cassette recorder taped to his body ('cos maybe the Hong Kong police didn't have wires back in 1987, I don't know). The bad guys grab Chow Yun Fat and feel him up for concealed weapons and shit, and their hands are wandering closer and closer to the cassette recorder. Oh no! Panic! Oh my gosh, what will Chow Yun Fat do?
He will grab the guy's hands, rub them against his crotch, and yell, "Do you find any weapons there? Huh? Huh? If you don't trust me, don't do business with me!"
So. Fucking. Awesome.
But hey, you know something? These movies wouldn't be what they are without the MOTHERFUCKING MEXICAN STANDOFF, BABY.
[Um. Screencap of 'City On Fire' Mexican standoff goes here.]
Hahaha.
...Huh, what nerd? Where?
"Smokey Joe's cafeeee..."
Hehehe.
In O12 news: OY. WTF I KNEW IT I KNEW IT WTF. Scroll down, last item. Dear O12, please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck...
...And now to the meat of this post.
You guys remember this? Bitches, I finally watched it. I finally got my grubby little hands on a copy and watched it. Now unless 'City On Fire' was based on something and something else is based on 'Kaante', I can safely say I'm all Reservoir Dogged out. And no, the 'Samurai Jack' lampoon doesn't count, if only because I've only ever watched the first four minutes. [Smacks Kazaa.] TOIL HARDER.
So yeah, Kaante is based on Reservoir Dogs is based on City On Fire. Right? Right, and I've watched all three of them and am going to indulge in geekery of a different sort than what this LJ usually offers.
Movie geekery and spoilers be behind that thar LJ-cut, arrr! Click (or don't), 'cos I know you're curious as I was about how one would incorporate dance numbers into a movie like 'Reservoir Dogs'. Visuals included.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
The Mr White character is the one in the white suit, and props to him. Amitabh Bachchan was the best thing in the movie. Props to you, sir.
I watched 'Kaante' purely for the 'Reservoir Dogs' references, so maybe I'm excused if the first half of 'Kaante' completely bored me. We didn't start Reservoir Dogging until halfway through the movie, warehouses and stomach wounds and all. (Sunil Shetty didn't freak out half as much as Tim Roth did, though.)
'Kaante' is a jumble of genres that you wouldn't think would mix, but hey, this is Bollywood and Bollywood makes magical things happen. You'd think 'Kaante' was an action/crime flick, what with that opening scene that is o_Oingly similar to the opening scene of The Usual Suspects, but suddenly there's a terminally ill wife, a mentally retarded sister, and a histrionic score that starts playing when anyone so much as gets a paper cut. Hello, soap opera. And then--because this is Bollywood--it's suddenly a music video.
All this is packaged in the very shiny sheen of techno-action movies a la the new 'Italian Job' and 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Everything has this hard yellow glow and there is an (over)abundance of camera tricks (slo-mo, trailing afterimage, etc). 'Kaante' is a B-movie giftwrapped in A-movie cinematography. 'Kay, well, I thought the foley artists went overboard sometimes. The punches sound way brutal.
It isn't a straight plot lift. Mr White & Co. aren't being used as templates either. It isn't exact that this character is that guy in 'Dogs'; it's more of a jumble. For example, Lucky Ali plays a guy called Bali, who steps into Pink's shoes when he confronts the White character about there being a rat among them, but also goes Blond when he starts torturing the cop. Sometimes characters come out of the left field, like White's terminally ill wife (and it never says what she's sick of) and Andy the software analyst who lost custody of his kid. Um. Yeah. We see more of the guys' personal lives than we do in 'Dogs'. 'Kaante' plays as a tragedy, while 'Reservoir Dogs' had a touch of something different. Also, although 'Kaante' was filmed in New York, the film says it's set in LA. Which, um. I mean hello, New York and LA? You can't casually switch one for the other, they're so different.
I have a strong suspicion that there's a lot of 'The Usual Suspects' in the plot as well, but seeing as I haven't finished watching that movie, I'll let that go. In fact, here's something interesting: the detective Bali tortures is named McQuarrie. Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for 'The Usual Suspects'.
"Speaking of scripts," you may say, "how do you know Sanjay Gupta didn't rip off Ringo Lam? How are you so sure he ripped off Quentin Tarantino?"
The subtitles for this scene tipped me off:
Then the subtitles for this scene really tipped me off:
"Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?" --Mr Blond (Michael Madsen) from 'Reservoir Dogs'
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
'Kay, so if you've read down this far, you're probably one of the people who knows that one of Tarantino's trademarks is the trunk shot. There's a camera in the trunk, looking up at whoever's opening it. You can even see this in From Dusk Till Dawn, which QT wrote but did not direct. The honor of that went to his husband, Robert Rodriguez.
Here's the 'Reservoir Dogs' trunk shot:
In 'Kaante', the trunk shot has been replaced by this:
They didn't have this McQuarrie in the car. As you can see from the subtitles, Sanjay Dutt brought him to the warehouse and dumped him there, in... some box, or something. Naw, seriously, it's just some box. Or something. They do the same trick, though, that when the guys reach down to pull the detective out of the box, their hands covers the camera lens in that cool, mess-with-your-head way.
And now, the ear-cutting scene! What ear-cutting scene? No ear-cutting scene! Which is good, because that would have been too obvious. McQuarrie did get punched around, but he got to keep his ear. Instead, they hung him in a scene lifted straight out of The Quick and the Dead:
And then they shot him dead, quickly.
I had predicted a high-kick dance number for the torture scene. Alas, I was wrong. There were no high kicks, just zoom-ins of the actors staring warily at each other while a tense song plays and the subtitled lyrics ominously declares things like:
There's Mr White at the top, there's the Pink/Blond hybrid below him.
So. No ear-cutting broadway extravaganza.
There was a "yay, we're going to be rich soon" broadway extravaganza, though, which I guess will have to do.
I gotta say, they dance a hella lot better than Mr Blond. The music was pretty catchy, too.
In terms of cinematography, 'City On Fire' is the opposite of 'Kaante'. This isn't surprising, considering the latter came out in 2002 and the former in 1987. 'City On Fire' is typical cheese noir, complete with girlfriend troubles and cheesetastic saxophone 'lonely city' music. You guys remember that lady who does the ethnic yodelling shtick in sad scenes (e.g. Troy, 25th Hour, Gladiator, etc.)? She's the modern saxophone. Someone gets shot, someone dies, someone realizes their shoes don't match their purse, and suddenly they get their woe on in the background like "WOAAAAAOAAAAAOOO!"
In 'Kaante' and 'Reservoir Dogs', you pretty much feel for every character, or you're supposed to. In 'City On Fire', the heart of the movie is with the Mr Orange character, played by Chow Yun Fat. It was interesting for me seeing him in this role, because usually he's so solemn and suchlike, but in this role he's talkative and a scoundrel. Like 'Kaante', 'City On Fire' laid on the emotional baggage reeeaaally thick. Tarantino pared down plenty. You could say 'Kaante' gave back to the 'City On Fire' story what Tarantino took away from it: the soap opera. 'Kaante' brought it back to its beginnings.
I don't have screencaps from 'City On Fire' because the movie's already been zipped on a CD and I don't feel like unzipping the damn thing 'cos that'd take way long. So. Um, CityOnFire!Orange had a pissy girlfriend and, because the movie was all about Orange, the CityOnFire!Dogs' characters were not as developed. Mmmkay.
'City On Fire' bored me kind of all the way through, except for this awesome scene. In this scene, there's an arms deal going on. Chow Yun Fat, pretending to be a villain, goes into this arms deal with a cassette recorder taped to his body ('cos maybe the Hong Kong police didn't have wires back in 1987, I don't know). The bad guys grab Chow Yun Fat and feel him up for concealed weapons and shit, and their hands are wandering closer and closer to the cassette recorder. Oh no! Panic! Oh my gosh, what will Chow Yun Fat do?
He will grab the guy's hands, rub them against his crotch, and yell, "Do you find any weapons there? Huh? Huh? If you don't trust me, don't do business with me!"
So. Fucking. Awesome.
But hey, you know something? These movies wouldn't be what they are without the MOTHERFUCKING MEXICAN STANDOFF, BABY.
[Um. Screencap of 'City On Fire' Mexican standoff goes here.]
Hahaha.
...Huh, what nerd? Where?