I love Asian movies. Unfortunately, every time I say that everyone instantly jumps to the conclusion I only watch hentai, kung fu movies, Category 3 HK softcore porn, cutie romantic Korean comedies, Akira Kurosawa, and AV stars like Aoi Sola and Maria Ozawa. What most cinephiles with Hollywood on their brain fail to understand is that Asian movies have a wide range of genres and have greater depth and quality than Westerners think. It's easy to believe that all Asian movies are about Ip Man or involve hot, sexy ingénues like Fan Bingbing, Hsu Chi, or the latest leggy Korean star.
I don't watch much movies, but I make an effort to watch twice the number of Asian movies as Hollywood movies in a year. Due to the availability of really good English subtitles, it's harder than it seems to actually do that. It's extremely difficult to discover really good movies such as Hear Me (Ting Shuo - 2009, Taiwan) which doesn't get as much press as The Avengers (2012). Last year, I clocked in at 36 Asian movies and 26 Hollywood flicks. Although it may seem unfair that Asian movies include everything from Bollywood (Delhi Belly), samurai (Tsukigami) , Korean historical romances (The Untold Scandal), Hong Kong detective thrillers (The Beast), over-the-top Japanese comedies (Maiko Haaan!), Hayao Miyazaki masterpieces (Secret World of Arrietty), Filipino (Tumbok) and Thai horror flicks, it's actually easier to stock up on American movies. After all, there are just some days when you want to kick back, avoid subtitles, and enjoy a superhero flick like The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). In 2012, Will Ferrell alone contributed three flicks to my American movie list (Semi-Pro, Casa de mi Padre, and The Legend of Ron Burgundy).
Screencap from Chungking Express (1994)
In one corner of the company where I work at in Shanghai, there's a big cardboard box of pirated DVDs. It's filled to the brim with German, French, American, Chinese and Japanese movies. The expatriates and foreign language translators, after purchasing the bootlegged movies off the street for as low as 15RMB, toss them into the box once their done, fully aware that they can't bring it to most airports around the world. My Shanghainese and other Chinese colleagues, on the other hand, prefer to get their fix of both Western and Asian movies through sites like Xunlei.com and Youku.com. My friend Xhiping told me that I can watch Chinese movies through Chinese video sites (through Baidu.com) since foreigners actually volunteer to add English subtitles for some of the recently released films - the Chinese government even lauded them publicly for their efforts. Since I've started working in China, I've watched entertaining films such as Speed Angels with Tang Wei, Love with Hsu Chi and Zhao Wei, and Laws of Attraction on my Ubuntu-powered Ideapad on the surprisingly fast video streaming sites. My Mandarin and Japanese is far from fluent but even I could tell that the subtitles were either ripped from the DVD or Blu-Ray discs or were exceptionally well-made.
Subtitles is one of the reasons why I end up plucking up one of the discarded DVDs from that box and ripping it old-school to MP4 using Handbrake in openSUSE and downloading better written subtitles from Opensubtitles.org. Ripping movies is so 1990s and it may seem like a lot of work but it's definitely worth it. I've discovered some truly exceptional movies from this pirated bootie such as Hula Girl, Dororo, Death Note Spin Off: Change the World, and Magic Hours - and these are only the Japanese movies! Some of the Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese discs don't have English subtitles or have poorly written or incorrectly synced text. It's occasionally a necessity to warm up any one of the available editors in Linux to sync the subtitles properly. Aegisub Subtitle Editor and Gaupol (both available in most Linux software repositories) are just two of the more popular subtitle utilities.
There's nothing worst than a poorly subtitled movie. I recently watched Rurouni Kenshin (2012) twice here in Shanghai (once without subtitles and the second time with fan-made subs). As usual, the anime/manga fanboy's eager translations were way, way, way off the mark, missing out on the subtleties of the language and basic sentence construction. Worst, whoever made the translation had no grasp of Japanese history or culture, referring instead to the somewhat dated manga and anime from which the movie was based from. As grateful as most people probably was to the volunteer, it was painful to watch the movie with fan-added and very American additions like "Sanosuke Suplex". P.S. When no one is talking in the scene, you have no right to add text in the subtitles just because you feel like it. It's an insult to the film and to people who understand Japanese.
Megumi screencap from Rurouni Kenshin (2012) - Highly recommended!
Five to eight years ago, ripping movies from discs involved breaking the encryption or using additional software to take care of the region code. Today, even a basic KDE application like K3B does a great job of getting your video on to your hard drive. Admittedly, I have a notion only the cash-strapped and non-American users (and the Torrent uploaders) really spend time ripping movies for their own entertainment. It's amazing there are people who actually work at it religiously considering the amount of free content legally and illegally available online. Amazon movies, iTunes, YouTube, Usenet, and torrents are just the tip of the iceberg. In some countries such as China, demand for movies is still so high, people not only still buy the media discs, you can also still rent them (Blockbuster going bankrupt be damned). The aforementioned Chinese video sites are proof alone that the U.S. of A isn't the only one with access to services that are similar to Hulu and Netflix. In fact, visit Youku.com and you'll find out that the people of the Middle Kingdom adore Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones as much as the average New Yorker.
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