A Guide to Asian Cinema

(Originally published in Hotdog, May 2004)

Think Asian. Whether it’s Uma hacking up the Crazy 88, Keanu striking a kung-fu pose or Tom going all Kurosawa as he straps on his Samurai armour, Hollywood is truly, madly and deeply in love with Asian Cinema. It’s an affair that’s been going on for decades, ever since Yul Brynner and co. cleaned up the town in 1960’s SEVEN SAMURAI remake THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN- but it didn’t truly catch fire until the 1990s, when the influences of Hong Kong’s ballistic action cinema (with a little help from a Mr Q. Tarantino) began filtering through to the U.S. mainstream.

Since then, the affair’s just gotten more and more serious- but while Hollywood has been playing catch-up with examples like the Wachowski Brothers’ gravity-defying wire-fu in THE MATRIX, Asian Cinema has been pushing forward into new dimensions with some of the most exciting, challenging and taboo-busting cinema on the planet.

“There’s an incredible motherlode of creativity coming out of Asia right now.” says Hamish McAlpine, owner of Tartan Films, the UK’s biggest distributor of Asian Cinema. “We do most of our buying at the Pusan Film Festival in Korea- and to be honest, I see more films that knock my socks off at Pusan than I ever do at Cannes. It’s where the juice is;- in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong.”

There’s a multitude of reasons for this increase of activity- but one of the biggest came thanks to the 1998 release of Asian Horror classic RINGU. The tale of a viral curse that lurks on a videotape and claims the life of anyone who watches it within seven days, RINGU smashed box office records, and by the end of 1998 had earned more than any other Japanese horror movie in history.

The success soon spun off into multiple sequels, a TV series, spin-off novels, a Korean remake entitled THE RING VIRUS as well as a sudden upsurge in horror flicks to cash in on RINGU’s success. “A few years ago,” says McAlpine, “you’d only get three or four Asian Horror films made per year- now, it’s between twenty and thirty.”

Films like THE EYE, PHONE, THE GRUDGE and A TALE OF TWO SISTERS were suddenly beating Hollywood at its own game, proving you didn’t need expensive CGI and lavish productions to generate scares- something as simple as a spooky, long-haired woman crawling across a floor could do the job. Refusing to follow conventional horror rules, Asian fright flicks generate an atmosphere of sustained dread with ease, while willingly killing off innocent characters just to fray the nerves of the audience even further. Suddenly, Hollywood studios were taking notice, and scrabbling for the remake rights to any Asian movie they could lay their hands on.

It was a risky proposition, but the first product of this buying frenzy has already gone down a storm, with 2003’s THE RING transforming RINGU into a crowdpleasing blockbuster and making a shedload of money in the process. It also means the dozens of remake projects being developed across Hollywood are now inching closer to production, and in the next twelve months the tidal wave of remake fever will begin to crash onto global cinema screens.

Whether or not cash registers ring across the world as a result, the Asian remake phenomenon is unlikely to vanish anytime soon. The art of remixing foreign films for US consumption is old news- but this new buying spree in Asia is different, because for the first time, Hollywood has access to a captive market of films that have been barely seen outside their home countries.

What’s more, the movies they’re targeting are frequently those actively influenced by American cinema. Asian producers are more than happy to hi-jack, rework or remix stories from the West, ending up with films like Korean sci-fi blockbuster NATURAL CITY replaying the plot of BLADE RUNNER, or acclaimed Hong Kong cop drama INFERNAL AFFAIRS owing a king-sized debt to Michael Mann’s HEAT.

The end result of all this cross-pollination is a colossal slate of western-influenced Asian blockbusters with massive “breakout potential”. Spearheaded by Korean-American producer Roy Lee, one of the men behind THE RING, US studios are now being encouraged to look on hit Asian movies as scripts that just happen to have already been filmed, packaged and tested in front of a massive audience.

Given most studio executives are terrified of betting their careers on a film unless they’re certain it’ll work, Hollywood has embraced the Asian remake concept at maximum speed- and it’s feeding back into the Asian Film Industry itself. Because their production costs are so low, the serious cash that Asian producers get for selling the movie rights- usually on hit films that have already made their money back at the domestic box office- can instead be funnelled straight back into making more Asian movies.

“There was a risk at one point that US studios would buy all the worldwide rights and prevent the original Asian versions from ever being seen in the West,” says McAlpine, “but thankfully, the producers are getting firmer at negotiating deals, and demanding the originals get some kind of a release. Whatever happens with the studio films, it’ll benefit Asian cinema in the long term.”

Hollywood may be strip-mining the East for everything it can find, leading to bizarre examples like Miramax buying Korean comedy MY WIFE IS A GANGSTER having only seen the movie on an unsubtitled tape- but there’s still plenty of daring, adventurous and ground-breaking Asian cinema the US Studios are too afraid to touch.

Top of the “never likely to get remade” list is legendary Japanese thriller BATTLE ROYALE. The hilariously twisted hyper-violent tale of schoolkids forced to fight to the death on a deserted island, it still hasn’t obtained an American release- mainly thanks to the USA’s post-Columbine climate not being ready for cute Japanese schoolgirls machine-gunning each other. Blatantly playing up to this, newly produced sequel BATTLE ROYALE II: REQUIEM goes even further in baiting the Yanks, featuring a 9-11 style skyscraper bombing in the opening titles, as well as a bizarre pro-terrorism slant and frequent references to an unnamed bullying anti-terrorist superpower known as “that country”.

If it’s cinematic subversion you’re after, however, the best Asian director to look to is one-man film industry Takashi Miike. Tackling everything from superheroes (ZEBRAMAN) and sci-fi (DEAD OR ALIVE: FINAL) to traditional yakuza thrillers (SHINJUKU TRIAD SOCIETY) and musicals (HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS), Miike’s lurid movies take cinematic rules and throw them into a blender, often purely for the hell of it. Insanely prolific, he’s shot twenty seven movies in the last five years, and yet claims he only went to film school because “it sounded like the ideal chance to escape home and do nothing.”

The foot-sawing torture climax of his breakthrough movie AUDITION sealed his reputation for pushing onscreen violence to the limit, but he’s since gone further, throwing intestines at the walls with wild abandon in the jaw-droppingly gory ICHI THE KILLER. Despite this, probably the scariest thing about Miike’s cinema is that it’s not all random shock tactics- the attention-grabbing violence and mind-blowing filmmaking techniques are always there to emphasise the theme of the story. Even with his latest, the mind-boggling yakuza horror flick GOZU, the body fluids and frenzied strangeness are all linked back to the inner turmoil of the befuddled main character.

Along with Miike, there are other directors pushing boundaries and experimenting with how much audiences can take- like fellow Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, the deranged genius behind low-budget mutation masterpiece TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, as well as challenging Korean filmmakers such as Chan Wook-Park (SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE) and Kim Ki-Duk (BAD GUY). In fact, while Ki-Duk’s films blend ravishing visual poetry with a brutally upfront take on sex, violence and cruelty, he’s also gotten in trouble with British censors for his movie THE ISLE- but not for the reasons you might expect.

As Hamish McAlpine explains: “We submitted THE ISLE to the BBFC- and they refused to give us a certificate. They had no problem with the sexual content or violence- it’s purely because of a couple of scenes where animals are harmed, especially one shot where a fish is caught, sliced up and eaten all in one take. There’d be no problem if it was a documentary- but because it was done for a film, it counts as animal cruelty, and I’ve been arguing this with the BBFC for the past two years.” THE ISLE is finally getting a release later this year, but as a cut version with the offending moments of animal cruelty snipped out.

Whatever happens, Asian cinema is standing on its own two feet, and will continue heading in its own distinctive direction, with or without Hollywood’s help. The upcoming wave of remakes could be the start of a potentially mind-blowing fusion between Eastern and Western Cinema… but there’s also the danger of something being lost in the process. THE RING may have been a slick, respectable reworking of the Japanese original- but it also smoothed out far too much of RINGU’s bizarre, ambiguous atmosphere, and it’s likely that many upcoming remakes will make the same mistake.

With only one success and plenty of projects waiting to test their muscle in the marketplace, the whole Remake craze could end up little more than a series of pale Hollywood Xeroxes, casually throwing out what made the Asian originals so distinctive in the first place. It’s the willingness of Asian cinema to shock, bewilder and pull the rug out from under the audience that’s gotten it so much attention;- and Hollywood would be wise to remember that…