Bollywood goes to Hollywood: DBB watches Kaante

I watched Kaante (2002) at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles this week. A few well-chosen and well-executed Bollywood production numbers helped make the movie's 2 1/2 hours fly by. Perhaps more heist movies should incorporate such numbers.

The major characters were all good, as were some of the minor ones. The solution to the movie's central mystery is arbitrary, but that's a red herring; the question drives the movie. The answer is beside the point.

The movie is in Hindi, liberally interspersed with English. All but one of the lead characters speaks both languages, and the script turns the linguistic duality into plot points both serious and comic. The film was shot in Los Angeles and incorporates several picturesque Los Angeles locations, among which is not, as far as I can tell, the Bradbury Building.

The New Beverly is Quentin Tarantino's theater, and Tarantino has been been quoted as rating Kaante high among movies influenced by his own Reservoir Dogs. I suspect that the occasional waves of what sounded like knowing laughter at the New Beverly reflected the audience's recognition of particular nods to Tarantino's movie, but knowledge of Reservoir Dogs is no prerequisite to enjoying Kaante.
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Enter the Quentin

Near the end of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee chases the villain Han through the latter's island paradise as Han flees a terraced arena/garden.  Had Quentin Tarantino shot the scene, Lee would have run right up the stone wall in slow motion, his legs windmilling.

Instead, he leaps onto a piece of furniture and propels himself over the wall, the way you or I would if chasing a sadistic, renegade megalomaniac. Given the aestheticized technical gimcrackery that has since become so closely associated with Hong Kong martial arts movies, Lee's act was endearingly human.

What has changed in moviemaking since Enter the Dragon's release in 1973, and who or what is to blame? Tarantino? The martial arts movies that influenced him? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

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(Read this blog's discussion of a Hong Kong martial arts movie that followed Enter the Dragon by twenty years and is already full of slow-motion flying. When did that sort of thing become a part of cinematic language?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012