Recently I’ve been watching a lot of Asian films, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the attributes that make them so personally endearing when compared to western cinema. The results are…inconclusive.
How are they different from western pictures? I’d like to say that their smaller budgets and more local target audiences make them rely less on canned special effects and expensive actors – but there’s been more more internationalized (e.g. westernized) big-budget movies in recent years. I’d like to say that they’re willing to try newer things, but I personally can’t strike the right chord with most indie films who do try and Asian films have become formulaeic in their own right.
Maybe it’s my Asian blood? I dunno, I still don’t get a lot of the cultural references, and some of the Japanese stuff is just crazy. For every quality film that I do get a chance to see, I probably had to endure some fifteen really bad ones.
Must be the non-Matrix-bastardized kung fu.