Hong Kong films have been very good since the 70s and Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood stole alot from them. Most Americans never were exposed to these great films
Not quite the same thing, but I’m reminded that the great Hong Kong production In the Mood for Love (2000) was filmed here in Bangkok, because Hong Kong no longer looked like it did in the 1960s but parts of Bangkok do.
We recently watched another great Hong Kong film, A Simple Life (2011).
My favorite Kurosawa film is High and Low. Such a great movie. When people discuss the best film noir movies, they always neglect Kurosawa’s work in favor of American and French directors – which is unfortunate because, in my opinion, Kurosawa is the best film noir director of all time. *Stray Dog *and High and Low are more than proof of that.
As Tarwater said, most notably in the 1990s, although over the years it’s become a mix of true independents (films that are financed and produced completely independently and are later picked up for distribution by a studio) and smaller films produced by the art house and specialty divisions of major studios, like Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, and Focus Features. These mini-outfits are usually the ones responsible for picking up distribution rights for foreign films and marketing them to American audiences. Sony Pictures Classics is especially known for its distribution of foreign titles.
Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film is an interesting read, if you’re looking to learn more about the transformation of independent cinema during the 1990s.
Hong Kong films have been popular in the U.S. for decades, but typically as genre films. Kung-fu/martial arts/sword fantasy fans would eat these up. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Five Deadly Venoms, One-Armed Swordsman, and so forth. Mainstream? Not so much, although Bruce Lee opened some doors. Jackie Chan and Jet Li continued the martial arts focus. Then you had the D&B films, and Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen and crossing over into police action thrillers (with Chan and Li helping pave the way of course.)
Were these films polished? Heck, no. But were they good. Hell, yeah.
Korean cinema is quite a different story. Up until about 1999 there was hardly any Korean cinema known in the U.S. Maybe a few festivals or art-houses, but that’s it. Certainly nothing like you had with HK films or the world-renowned efforts of the famous Japanese directors (Kurusawa, Ozu, Kobayashi, Gosha, etc.)
About 1999-2000, several Korean films hit it big internationally. Shiri, Tell Me Something, Attack the Gas Station!, Memento Mori, Bichunmoo, Il Mare, Ditto, JSA, to name just a few. Now you’ll notice from that list a whole range of genres: rom-com, love drama, horror, military espionage and action, social comedy. Not just some grindhouse churning out genre cheapies.
Film lovers in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the West I suppose) started eating up Korean film. It was new, it was not the same-old same-old. Treasures abounded! Web chats exploded–“did you see The Quiet Family?” “Hey, check out Art Museum by the Zoo” And of course, when My Sassy Girl came out, that was all she wrote–Korean film was now a genuine worldwide phenomenon.
As to your question, why now? As mentioned by others, it was that U.S. audiences (other than the martial arts geeks) demanded higher production values, and with the advent of DVD (and especially region-free DVD players), studios knew they could recoup costs on the worldwide market. I can’t tell you how many Korean Region 3 DVDs I imported for my personal DVD library (200? 300?). Production values increased commensurate with ticket and DVD sales.
Is there crap coming out of Korea? Undoubtedly. But I’d rather watch a crappy Korean rom-com or heist film than a mediocre Hollywood effort, just for the change of pace and freshness. Though, truth be told, after 12-13 years of vacuuming up Korean movies, I’m a bit more critical of the poor or mediocre ones than in the beginning.
First, I disagree that Asian films have always been good. To be sure, there have been some good films from Asia, but frankly, most of them were not acceptable to Western audiences for a couple of reasons. Low production values, as you both noted, were one factor, but IMO not the major reason that Western audiences didn’t appreciate films being made in Asia.
I’d have to chalk that up to the vast differences in narrative structure employed by Asian storytelling and Western storytelling. The past couple of decades have seen the maturation of a new generation of filmmakers and storytellers (in manga, anime, music, etc.) that were raised on both tradiational Asian storytelling narrative and more modern western narrative structures, and thus a confluence of styles has evolved which is helping to make Asian storytelling more palatable to Western audiences.
This, combined with the access to newer, more affordable technology has brought Asian films up quite a few notches in the perceptions of many Westerners. Add in the fact that there are distinctly different histories and tropes in Asian stories, and to many of us here in America and Europe, it’s like finding an awesome treasure of new material to enjoy.
Some of the best films of the past decade came out of Hong Kong and S. Korea, and there is a burgeoning film industry in Central Asia/Eastern Europe as well, with lots of great movies being made in the past decade or so. India has always had a thriving film industry (it’s actually the largest in the world), and thanks to rising production values and more modern storytelling, they are also now reaching audiences in the West and all over the world.
ETA: the recent success of PSY’s Gangnam Style song and video, are IMO another fine example of how styles are converging thanks to the internet and general media distribution in the modern age. I know that in my favorite music genre (metal), we’ve been seeing more and more bands from all over the world that are legitimately headbanging in the past decade as well.
Most films aren’t good,* period*. It doesn’t matter if they’re Asian, European, American, or whatever. The fact remains that Asia has been producing good films almost as long as the format has been in existence.
Western audiences aren’t the arbiters of good taste; they don’t get to decide which films are good and which are bad.
Are you implying that Asian cinema has improved because Asian directors have adopted Western film-making and story-telling techniques in the past few decades? Ignoring for a moment that your entire thesis implies that Asian art, prior to being influenced by the West, was inferior because it was different, you’re wrong on a factual level, too.
Japanese and Korean artists have been making films for close to a century. Intelligent, thought-provoking films that are interesting to watch and have much to offer the world artistically. The story-telling techniques in those films are nearly identical, more or less, in a broad and generalized way, to films that were coming out in the Western world at the same time. Take a look at a film like Punguna and tell me it’s markedly different from Western films of the same period. That film was produced ninety years ago, and yet if you were to magically replace the Korean peasants with German workers, not even film critics would know the difference.
The truth is that Asia has always been producing great films. The only reason the Western world has remained ignorant of this fact for so long is because, like I pointed out, until recently, there hasn’t been a market for independent foreign films. In the nineties, film companies like Miramax and Columbia began snapping up the distribution rights to Korean, Hong Kong, and Japanese films, but that doesn’t mean that Asian cinema suddenly saw a drastic improvement in quality during that period – it means that there was finally a market for their international release. You can’t look at classic films from the 50s and 60s like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Tokyo Story, and say that Asian films have only become “palatable” to American audiences during the last couple decades. That’s not true.
Asian cinematographers and directors, by and large, have had the same access to technology as their American counterparts, for as long as they’ve been making films. At least the technology that matters – in terms of CGI and stuff, you have a point. But all the stuff you need to make a great film, Asian directors have been using.
Yes, of course what I was saying was that they were inferior. Obviously that was the whole “thesis” I was arguing, and the main reason I decided to post in this thread. :rolleyes:
That’s what your comment sounded like to me too. I think the confusion may be because you first stated that Asian films “have not always been good” and then went on to argue that Asian films have not always been palatable to Western audiences–two very different things. But I think that basically you both agree.
A very likeable Thai movie.
As for Japanese noir, don’t forget Pale Flower (1964).
As for Thai films, I’d rather have my all my teeth pulled out than watch one. The wife feels the same, and she is Thai. But two of note are The Elephant Keeper (1987) and Chang (1927). Chang is cheating a bit though, as it is an American production. But it is a fantastic film, shot on site in remote Thailand – still called Siam at the time – and starring local residents. And the filmmaking team later went on to make the great classic King Kong.
Have you ever seen anything by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (also known as “Joe” in the West)? I haven’t seen anything myself, but he’s pretty much the only Thai filmmaker I know. His last movie, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, so I thought maybe he had a particularly high profile in Thailand.
But sometimes an Asian movie is interesting just because it’s different. The first DVD I bought was Mr Vampire. Mr Vampire came out in 1985, the same year as Fright Night. Objectively, I can’t claim Mr Vampire was a better movie than Fright Night but it seemed more original and entertaining to me because I hadn’t experience the cliches of Chinese vampire movies before.
Great Movie.
Not a higher standard, but it’s expensive to dub or subtitle a movie. You can release a bad film in English for just the cost of transferring it to DVD, but if the film is in Japanese, you need to hire a translator, hire voice actors (for dubbing) or someone to write up the titles and put them on the screen. And that’s before the cost of transferring to DVD.
Since it costs more to prepare DVDs, producers don’t bother with foreign films unless they are good enough to attract an audience.
i’ll second this. Fan Chan captured the “cassette era” very well. even the songs were nostalgic, despite my not having heard them before.
Amazing acting by the kids too!
Sigh. I miss childhood.
There’s the old maxim that 90% of everything is crap. We tend to only see the 10% that is good. For every Kurosawa there were 12 cheesy Gamera movies (and worse!). For every John Woo there were fifty directors making bad Kung-Fu movies.
I wouldn’t use the 80’s as a barometer of technical anything. I was looking at a few main release Hollywood movies done in the 80’s and the photography, lighting and direction was horrid and uninspired. Movies from 10 years earlier had much better photography in general.
He’s known in Thailand, but his films keep getting censored here for one reason or another. He keeps winning honors abroad, but really, what most Thais want to see are pratfalls by comic monks, transvestites and the more the merrier, and lots of farting, so they really don’t care about him. He’s not my cup of tea either, but neither are the mainstream Thai movies. I’m generally embarrased by what’s shown on the silver screen here, which can be broken down into two main catageories: Incredibly silly or incredibly violent including the super-gross horror movies.
I’ll second this. In India, before we had much exposure to them, we used to think Hollywood movies were generally good 