at one point, miramax was going to release shaolin soccer in u.s. as _kung fu soccer_, aarrgghh...
miramax essentially did same thing with _infernal affairs_, stylish hitman flick directed by andrew lau (in contrast to actor and canto popper andy lau) who made name with _young and dangerous_ 'triad boyz' films in mid-90s, then shifted direction dramatically in helming _storm riders_, state-of-the-art special effects, martial arts fantasy that pushed post-production work in hk cinema to new standard...
_if_ became second highest box office film in hk behind shaolin soccer, miramax kept it on shelf in u.s. for almost 2 years, then allowed it to open in 5 theatres nationwide (well, actually, only in nyc), couldn't have anything to do with fact that martin scorcese is making hollywood version of film to be released next year (scorcese's film is unofficially and somewhat jokingly being called 'gangs of hong kong'
At least, Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer made it into the international market without being supplanted by a Hollywood remake.
Hollywood insists on remakes, rather than importing originals and marketing them well, even when the originals have a very Hollywood narrative structure, focus on action and style rather than dialogue, etc., like Luc Besson's Nikita (1990, grossing $5,017,971 in the USA), remade as "Point of No Return" (1993, grossing $30,038,362 in the USA). Imports with subtitles are almost inevitably confined to "art houses," opening on few screens. Hollywood (probably correctly) thinks that Americans don't want to watch subtitled foreign films, but, unless Americans are habituated to finding subtitled films in regular theaters, they won't get used to watching them. There is no easy way to break this circle.
Hollywood is on a remake spree, remaking European films, remaking classic Hollywood films, remaking B movies, and remaking Asian films:
<blockquote>Thanks to a handful of enterprising Asian-American producers working in Los Angeles (mainly Roy Lee and his company Vertigo), remake rights are selling like the hottest of cakes. Their biggest sale so far has been the Japanese horror film Ringu, remade as The Ring.
The tale of a vengeful female spirit, Ringu had been unknown in the US, with no distribution of any kind: a sad comment on America's cultural isolation. But the resulting Hollywood blockbuster was a box-office smash, and later sold two million DVDs on its first day of release. A sequel is being made, and its cultural effects are already glimpsed in mainstream Hollywood films such as Peter Pan, where the evil mermaids in Neverland are witchy Asian women.
Everyone thinks that the Japanese original is vastly superior (there's a scene in the current BBC television drama Sea of Souls where this bit of nerd lore is imparted by a video-store clerk). But it did set the scene for rapid sales of Asian ideas and screenplays. Miramax (who more or less started the stampede in 2001) bought My Wife is a Gangster (Korea) for Queen Latifah and Shall We Dance? (Japan) for Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere (set for US release in August); MGM acquired Hi! Dharma! (Korea), about a gang of crooks hiding out in a Buddhist monastery; and Fox 2000 landed Tell Me Something (Korea), about a serial killer. Meanwhile, the tragi-comedy My Sassy Girl (Korea) has been bought by Madonna's production company, Maverick.
Even the bearish film commentator Harry Knowles, an internet legend in the USA, has cottoned on to the remake boom. He astonished everyone by waving a video cassette on his Christmas TV show and claiming that "absolutely the best film of the year" had just been sent to him on tape from Korea, called Oldboy. I'm told it was the only subtitled copy of the video in existence, and the film was on its way to Miramax before he got his paws on it. It's by the Sympathy for Mr Vengeance director Chan Wook Park, and is the story of a man who must solve the mystery of his own kidnapping. "A film of genius", the gingery guru splutters on his internet site. You'll not be surprised to hear, perhaps, that there's a big bidding war going on for the remake rights, and David Lynch is tipped to helm.
(Roger Clark, "Why Hollywood Is Brimful of Asia," <http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/story.jsp?story=493102>, 20 Feb. 2004)</blockquote>
Neoliberal capitalism + no new ideas = postmodern culture?
At 3:23 PM -0400 5/13/05, Michael Hoover wrote:
hollywood films have already come to dominate hk screens that used to show mostly hk films, whereas box office top ten was once comprised of 8 hk films and 2 hollywood, circumtance is now other way around most of the time, with some south korean films thrown in from time to time (btw: guy named anthony leong has written book entitled _korean cinema: the new hong kong_)
transnationals, mostly - if not exclusively - u.s., are changing face of hk cinematic political economy, new relations (deepening relations is, perhaps, more accurate) portend transformation from 'national' cinema - to extent that hk had a national cinema - to 'post-national' one, a 'global/world' cinema under hollywood hegemony (btw 2: koreans are selling film rights to hollywood at rapid pace)... michael hoover
It's a good question whether Hong Kong ever had a "national cinema" -- Hong Kong has never been a nation, a city state that has negotiated its existence from colonialism to post-Communist capitalism. It's perhaps fitting that one of the best cinematographers -- perhaps _the_ best one -- in Hong Kong cinema is an Australian Christopher Doyle.
It is reported that Hong Kong "produced a measly 64 features and took $57 million at the box office," a dramatic decrease from "300 movies a year and had box office takings of more than a billion Hong Kong dollars annually in the mid-1990s," due in part to "video disc piracy" and "computer download services," according to the Associated Press (Min Lee, "Hong Kong Film Industry in Slump," <http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050430/ap_en_bu/hong_kong_movie_slump>, 30 Apr. 2005).
China now has only 2,000 screens for 1.3 billion people (Lee, 30 Apr. 2005), so HK film-makers can get a second wind if the mainline Chinese acquire a moving-going habit, but that may not come to pass in the age of VHSs and DVDs.
"National cinemas" for countries that ever got around to developing them increasingly belong to the past of state socialism in the Eastern Bloc, social democracy and welfare states in Europe and Japan, and developmental states aiming for import substitution in decolonizing countries.
Maybe, each mode of production and each stage within it have their own dominant art forms: poetry was the premier art form of the feudal age, novels rose with the emerging bourgeoisie, peaking in the nineteenth century, and cinema was the star of monopoly capitalism and state socialism.
Cinema (as well as architecture) is the most capital intensive of all art forms, so its heyday in a number of nations' film industries appears to have ended with the 1970s, as subsidies have ended or declined, as in the case of Ghana discussed in G. Pascal Zachary's "Let's Make a Movie" (<http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/127/>, 25 Oct. 2002).
Francophone African film makers can get French subsidies, but it is said that their films are rarely shown at home: "In Francophone Africa, subsidies to filmmakers from the French government spawned a generation of well-trained and high-minded directors, including Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Souleymane Ciss� (Mali) and Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso). These and other French-speaking directors made movies that were acclaimed by discerning critics in Europe and the United States, but rarely screened at home" (Zachary, 25 Oct. 2002). Compared to them, HK film makers are still relatively fortunate.
The decline of the HK film industry notwithstanding, the Indian film industry, very commercial, is the largest in the world, with a relatively well developed distribution network beyond the home market (Parminder Vir, John Woodward, and Neil Watson, "The Indian Media and Entertainment Industry," <http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/filmindustry/india/>, April 2002), so a "global/world' cinema may not be exactly under Hollywood hegemony. "The Indian film industry is expected to grow annually at 16 percent to cross the Rs.100-billion mark by 2007 and reach Rs.143 billion in 2010, says management consultancy firm KPMG" (IANS, "Indian Film Industry Must Corporatise to Turn Global," <http://www.indiaglitz.com/channels/hindi/article/14098.html>, 7 Apr. 2005). Since many developing nations' cultures (in their family structures, sexual mores, and so on) are still more like India's than America's, Indian film exports may grow as expected. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
