by Anthony Chatfield

Created on: February 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

The porting of Asian film to the United States has seen a sharp uptake in recent years with the advent of Miramax and Sony's interest in outside markets. The Weinstein's desire, along with the ever vocal voice of Quentin Tarantino, to share with the world the marvels of a world cinema that is constantly innovating and producing amazing films has meant more and more options for the rest of us. But with that desire has come an ages old dilemma that anyone who regularly watches these films would have hoped to have died decades ago the dreaded cut.

The cutting of foreign films has been going on for years. It's basically the American studio executives deciding for the American people what they will and will not understand. So they take a perfectly amazing film and cut out vast quantities of the story and remake the film in a manner more suitable to the short attention spans and fickle nature of a nation that doesn't like to read at the movies.

The results are appalling sometimes as not only do they take out vital scenes just because they contain cultural references that Americans may not understand, they dub over the original voices with English voices so as the American public won't have to read subtitles.

It's not new, and if you go back and watch any Kung Fu film released in America in the 70s or 80s it's still there. It's a shame that the results are so horrible, because some of these films are truly amazing. And it's Miramax that's the biggest culprit in these film cutting crimes.

Take Shaolin Soccer for instance, one of my favorite films from Hong Kong in the last 15 years. The original Stephen Chow cut of the film in Hong Kong was 113 minutes long, a respectable normally cut film. The American cut released two years later was only 87 minutes long. Somewhere in the film they'd seen fit to cut almost a half hour of the comedy and/or action out. They'd essentially rewritten how the film would be shown, but taking out an entire subplot.

The same can be said of any imported film. The Protector, a Thai import released this last fall was released with 27 minutes cut from the film. The critics panned it for being nonsensical and baseless in its plot. I've seen the Thai cut and I can say it wasn't astoundingly well written, but it was decent and of course it's baseless when you've cut 25% of the film out for a domestic audience. The results are unfair to the filmmakers too, whom are now left to try and market their films here after a studio decimated their last work to the point of making it unwatchable.

Anime sees the same effect, thought to less detriment. The violence and especially the sexual innuendo of many animes aired on American TV are cut extensively, sometimes removing entire episodes from the timeline, or altering how the show is seen by American audiences, not to mention the rewriting of lines for English dialogue.

When I go to see a film, I hope to see what the director wanted me to see, not what a board of stuffy American executives and censors decided would be acceptable for my poor dumb American brain. For that reason, I am more than happy to rent and purchase imported DVDs from overseas with the original cut of the film left intact and the original language track untouched. Then I can see what was meant to be seen.

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