Week 1532 - Buffy, Demon Hunters and One-Take Shots

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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A couple of weeks ago, my 25-years old K-Pop fan daughter insisted I watch K-Pop Demon Hunters, a Korean animated film. I resisted for a few days, until finally one day I gave in and watched it with her, her third viewing.

It starts out a little loud and garish, but then once the songs begin and the story line unfolds, it gets to be quite interesting. Two numbers, Golden and What it Sounds Like have become ear-worms…each time I hear them and we do play them during workouts, they attach themselves to my grey matter and continue playing in my head for at least a few hours more. 

I assume when the movie was first conceived it was aimed at the Gen-Z, young millenial audience that devours K-Pop dramas…I don’t think they anticipated that the movie would cut across age groups and generations to appeal to even 60-years old like me. 

I guess each generation gets its demon hunters and slayers. 

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer first came out in 1997, I was already a practicing radiologist, but I watched each and every episode through its 7 seasons and then the spin-off Angel and then went back and managed to watch the 1992 film too. Today, it isn’t available on any Indian network, and it is campy, if you watch the YouTube trailer, but 25 years ago, it was different, interesting and Sarah Michelle Gellar just killed it. I also went through the initial seasons of True Blood and all the Twilight and Underworld movies. 

To me, it seems like there is a straight line from Buffy slaying vampires to the Demon Hunters slaying demons, with so many other shows and movies along the way.

Saturday night we felt like just watching some song videos on YouTube on the television. After watching the the two numbers from Demon Hunters, we made our way through a bunch of old and new English and Hindi songs and then my wife asked to put on Gallan Goodiyan from Dil Dhadakne Do. The video has an amazing energy, and 2 minutes into it, we realized that it was a one-take and so we restarted it and watched it enthralled, from start to finish. The reason for the song’s vibe is the one-take and you can make out a few coordination issues in the dance steps, but that is what makes the song better because it captures what would happen in real life.  

For me, the best one-take song is Another Day of Sun from La-La Land at the beginning of the movie and perhaps the most interesting one-take is from Daredevil Season 1, the 3 minutes hallway fight scene. 

I then started checking for more one-take shots in Indian movies. Roop Tera Mastana, from Aradhana is a one-take, so is Raabta from Agent Vinod and then there is the 11 minute one-take from the Malayalam movie, Malik. 

So often, when you are watching a show or a movie, you don’t realize it is one-take, until you do. It usually takes a minute or two before you it dawns on you that there is no edit, no sudden change or cut and then you just go back and watch it all over again for the beauty of the shot itself. A simple search on YouTube will throw up a bunch of Hollywood films with one-take scenes and even some one-take films.

Nothing profound today. Just a recap of interesting stuff that I watched over the week/weekend, my current favorites shows being Alien Earth and Peacemaker Season 2.