Welcome to the third (yet another unexpected, but I believe most certainly final) part of my editorial series that was initiated this year. I was unable to make a blog update for the past two weeks because I was busy with work as well as battling the flu. Thankfully, I managed to recover, so instead of a review post, I decided to compose another rambling text. Rest assured, this time it will not be about the shortcomings of blog writing or being a movie critic. Instead, I wanted to focus on the modern-day availability of Asian movies. As I have said repeatedly over the years, we live in the times of digital immediacy, and enthusiasts of Asian Cinema are blessed with many different ways of watching movies fair and square (I covered this phenomenon in detail in the editorial called Hunting for Asian Movies and Dramas the Legal Way- Small Tips for Beginners). However, does many automatically mean better? Recently, I have come to realise that this is not necessarily the case. There are so many streaming services, physical media, film festivals, and TV broadcasts in 2023 that the 30-year-old me finds it very hard to choose a movie from the abundance of sources. In contrast, the 15-year-old me had only two sources to choose from: TV and a rental store. Indeed, I was bound to be limited to a narrow selection of titles, but it was much easier for me to choose a movie! To date, I remember making my way through Jackie Chan’s titles on VHS. In the early 2000s, little did I know that Jackie Chan’s First Strike was actually a re-cut version of Police Story IV or that Mr. Nice Guy was directed by Sammo Hung. All of that seemed so new to me, but I was not focused on movie trivia, I just wanted to feel entertained by the art of moving images. The same goes for discovering Godzilla movies on TV. Staying up till late evening to watch those Heisei and Millennium entries with wonky translations and Polish voiceover was truly a joy to experience. Nowadays, if I want to watch a Godzilla movie, I have to pop a disc into a DVD player. Television no longer cares about the Big G. For some reason, they play the 1998 Hollywood version non-stop, almost every month across many channels. Is it because the licensing for this film has the cheapest price? My only regret is that I wish my hunger for Asian Cinema had started earlier, back in the heyday of physical media, because I could have got more titles for myself, like the exclusive two-volume Akira Kurosawa DVD/Blu-Ray boxset that is now, sadly, out of print or stand alone issues of Ring (1998) sequels (that can now only be obtained as a part of Arrow Blu-Ray collection). All in all, what I want to say is that good movies are out there but I find it increasingly hard to uncover them while flicking through Netflix or Amazon Prime. For instance, Filmbox Arthouse recently advertised that they are going to broadcast Mikio Naruse’s A Wanderer’s Notebook (1962), but there was absolutely no information about potential broadcast times, just the title card(!) I don’t know, perhaps I’m really getting old and I just can’t comprehend digital information anymore. In any case, I will keep on trying to expand my cinema journey and watch more movies. In the meantime, thank you for reading. A Night in Nude (1993)
As Tears Go By (1988)
Police Story IV: First Strike (1996)
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)
Ring (1998)
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