TWO ASIAS
All this is a preamble to the suggestion that there is not just one Asian Cinema but at least two. The first is Asian cinema as it really is, or at least as it looks to people who are observing it from inside the culture. The second is the way it looks to us — an Asian Cinema that exists mostly in the fevered imaginations U.S.-based fans. It would be prejudicing the case to dub one of them “real” or “authentic” and the other “imaginary” or “inauthentic,” but that is sort of the way it shakes out. The biggest hit of the year at the Japanese box office right now is probably something American or, barring that, the feature version of an anime TV show; meanwhile, American hipster aficionados of all things X-treme are lionizing a hyper-violent yakuza-film pastiche that went straight to video in the domestic market. Although come to think of it, that's probably old news by now, and those who are truly "with it" have probably moved on to something else.

POSEURS?
So in foreign-movie fandom, is the painfully hip automatically inauthentic? And does it matter? The way things work now, in the age of all-region DVDs and online rips and downloads, everything that is produced anywhere is available everywhere almost instantly. The flourishing fan markets for Japanese anime and Hong Kong gangster movies were enabled by the home-video boom, a process that has only been jacked up even further by the evolution of technology. When everything is radically available, cineaste pioneers can bypass the traditional gatekeepers and sample anything that strikes their fancy, assembling their own custom-tailored pantheon like a Jenny Craig candidate grazing a buffet table.

Pushto sex icon Sunita Khan

PLUS-SIZE PULP CINEMA
Everyone who loves movies makes them their own. They appropriate and repurpose, and the mutants that result from this cross-breeding are often terrifying to behold. This sort of thing is happening in some surprisingly far-flung corners of the world. A trash-cinema-loving video store owner in Islamabad, Pakistan, named Omar Khan, is constructing a new local hybrid from such unique sub-continental sub-genres as the "walking corpse" films of Bombay horror specialists the Ramsay Brothers and the plus-size soft-core of the Pushto-language B-movies of Northern Pakistan, in order to create his own monstrous collage of a movie, Zibahkhana, boldly billed as "The First Pakistani Gore Film!"

THE KOREAN WAVE AND THE INDIAN REEF Any observant student of Asian cinema is obliged to acknowledge that, from an objective, market-oriented standpoint, the only Asian cinema markets that are truly robust at the moment — in the sense of expanding into foreign markets, increasing budgets, and improving production values — are those of South Korea and India. While the industries such as the old standbys of Hong Kong and Japan seem to be treading water, struggling to keep the tips of their noses above the surface, Korea's widely distributed feature films, and especially its all-conquering TV dramas, are the entertainment products people everywhere else in East Asia can't wait to see. Meanwhile, India's prolific Bollywood, which makes more per year than Hollywood and Europe combined (over 1,000), has a huge loyal audience both at home and around the world in the Indian diaspora, and a growing global non-Indian fan base.

But I'd hate to think that sly Pakistani/Pushto skin-flick/gore movies were therefore off limits.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

RECENT RELEASES

There will soon be two state-of-the-art versions of one of the Holy Grails of kung fu cinema collectors, the landmark Angela Mao Ying headbanger Hapkido, aka Lady Kung Fu; a British (Region 2) version is out already from Hong Kong Legends, and an American (Region 1) release is due out on the Weinstein Company's Dragon Dynasty label in October. Sammo Hung and Carter Huang co-star.

City of Violence, a stylized School-of-Tarantino revenge flick from South Korea, gets a full-course Dragon Dynasty makeover.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, directed by Asia Extreme poster boy Park Chan-wook (Oldboy).

The Kid With the Golden Arm, an infamously blood-soaked "Five Venoms" martial arts film, directed by Old School cult idol Chang Cheh of The One-Armed Swordsman.

Eye in the Sky, a Johnny To–produced police procedural about a covert surveillance unit of the HKPD; the directorial debut of screenwriter Yau-Nai-hoi (Election).

Shootout at Lokhandwala, a fact-based, hard-boiled Mumbai procedural from the Ram Gopal Varma stable. The media-circus plot recalls Johnny To's Breaking News.

Ghutan, an EC Comics-style walking-corpse revenge drama that is also a comeback film, of sorts, for the Kings of Bollywood B Horror, the fabled Ramsay Brothers.

The Justice of Life, the 1989 Hong Kong TV drama that made Stephen Chow Sing-chi a star — 15 years before Kung Fu Hustle. The all-future-star supporting cast includes Chow's latter-day sidekick Ng Man-tat, Alex Man Chi-leung, Anthony Wong Chau-sang, and Theresa Mo Sun-kwan.

War and Beauty, the smash-hit 2004 HK TV series, a period family drama of backstabbing intrigue in the court of the emperor Jiaqing (1796-1820).

DAVID CHUTE began writing about Hong Kong Cinema in 1987 and Bollywood in 1992, primarily for Film Comment and the LA Weekly