Blog From The Bench

Well, the blogs have just gone public and I'm already falling behind what I had hoped. This entry is a fairly simple one, because I just want to pose a quick question that I'm not sure I can answer fully: Why is Asian cinema so much cooler than North American cinema?

This week, I have been working on reviews for The Sword of Doom, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and A Tree of Palme. They have all been very different experiences from each other, but I have been floored by how cool they all are. We don't have much stuff like this, and we never have.

I'm aware that a lot of it must have to do with the fact that it's different and exotic for me. I live in North America, so seeing North America represented on film isn't as exciting as seeing representations from other cultures. There's more to it than that, though, because I've now seen a whole lot of Asian films, and I've gotten used to the conventions reasonably well. They just seem to be able to do more interesting things within the conventions than the majority of Hollywood directors.

Perhaps it's just that Hollywood is now in a position of playing catch-up with what other filmmakers are doing around the world. At one point it used to be the other way around, but now so many Hollywood movies are just hollow attempts to cash in on something cool that some scriptwriter saw from somewhere else and thought he/she could match. Hopefully that will change with the increased popularity of indie films in North America.