The RZA

No, not really. But this is supposed to be a column about Asian DVDs, and I wanted to begin by making a crucial point: I have always looked at this stuff as a mainstream movie critic attempting to translate my exotic discoveries for readers who are, like me, neither fanboys nor academics. Both of those camps seem to me to be, in their different ways, alarmingly over-specialized and uncritical. (A discussion for another time, perhaps.) Both Tarantino and Mitchell, and certainly the RZA, were youthful fans for whom the circumstances of original reception (as they say at Harvard) have contributed a great deal to their continuing affection for these films. For me they have always been admired products of foreign cinemas, and as such they are presumed worthy of respect until proven guilty of cheesiness. Surprisingly often, they have rewarded that openness.

So fair warning: This will not be a snarky "trash cinema" column. It will, however, be a column that embraces fervently the new home-theater epoch ushered in by the greatest invention to date of the 21st Century: the no-region DVD player. These are players that, either in their original flexible firmware (which can be accessed via hidden menus) or from some sort of hack or do-it-yourself hardware modification, are able to sidestep the regional locks encoded onto DVDs and play discs manufactured anywhere on earth. And since most of these machines retail for less than $100.00 it is fair to say that the entire treasure trove of world cinema is now available to anyone anywhere with the good sense to reach out and grasp it.

In this context, I feel honor bound to admit that I already own hundreds of Shaw Brothers martial arts films on DVD and VCD, letterboxed and subtitled, with dialogue in Mandarin or Cantonese rather than Pidgin English. When I purchased my first no-region player in 2002, a CyberHome CH-DVD 500 manufactured in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, People's Republic of China, it was to watch these discs. (Most of them were purchased from YesAsia.com, the Amazon of the East.)

Lo Lieh in King Boxer Lo Lieh in King Boxer

Here's the backstory:

Ever since the early 1980s, when Shaw Brothers essentially abandoned feature-film production in favor of TV, Hong Kong's biggest and most cutthroat movie studio had been sitting on a legendary library of close to 1,000 movies, all made between 1954 and 1984 (give or take a few) and including a large majority of the most popular martial arts movies. Only a handful of video releases and festival screenings were authorized in that almost 30-year period. The story goes that boss Sir Run Run Shaw was so paranoid about video piracy that he couldn't bear to let the movies out of his sight. But in 2001 the entire collection ended up with Hong Kong's Celestial Pictures, which, in turn, contracted Intercontinental Video for distribution. IVL has been doing a bang-up job ever since, releasing up to a dozen gorgeous new digital restorations a month on VCD and Region 3 DVD since 2002.

Celestial is also exercising its remake rights, moving forward on new versions of two Chang Cheh classics, the campy cult favorite Five Deadly Venoms (1978), to be written and directed by Hong Kong repat Kirk Wong Chi-keung (Crime Story/Zhong an zu, 1993), and the Point Blank (1967) homage Vengeance (Baochou, 1970), which will be rehelmed by Cory Yuen Kuei (DOA: Dead or Alive, 2007).

My impression is that the Dragon Dynasty editions have superior image and sound quality, and they can certainly boast (ahem) far superior special features. (Check out some crystal clear frame grabs here.) Nevertheless, it would be an act of borderline "ugly Americanism" to claim that the films are only now, getting the home-video respect they deserve simply because a decent "Made in the USA" line of DVDs has finally been made available. The key to becoming a happily sated fellow traveler of the No Region World Order is a willingness to meet foreign cinemas at least halfway. You no longer have to wait for them to come to you — or for gatekeeping film-festival programmers in the U.S to hand them to you on a silver platter.

Our aim will be to avoid that kind of cultural myopia, with the help of a no-region player and a fat expense account. Watch this space.

David Chute lives in Los Angeles. He has a day job at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and is the Bollywood correspondent for the LA Weekly.