Why I Avoid the Asian Cinema

Hmmm, I looked today and there appears to be a bonus DVD in the Closer box - Kar Wai Wong's 2046. It appears Sittha snuck this in because somehow, he believes it is up to him to convert me to the Asian movie. This is a nice, cultured sentiment, but he's going to fail. Here's the thing. I do not like Asian movies. It's not a racist thing or a snobby thing or anything like that - I simply do not watch Asian movies. Any Asian movies - Thai, Korean, Japanese, Indian, if it hails from the continent of Asia, I do not watch it, not voluntarily anyway (for a film studies class at MUIC, one of my assignments was to watch the Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger, which I did so half-asleep). I just never found an Asian movie that caught my fancy. I will gladly watch movies from any other continent (I immensely enjoyed the French film - complete with subtitles - M. Hulot) and I've been dying to see the Mexican movie El Crimen de Padre Amaro (did I say that right?), but nothing Asian. I just don't know why. I think it's the Asian discourse - not that I'm positing that there's some sort of catchall Asian discourse pattern, just that in general, Asians tell stories in a circular fashion, with a lot unsaid that should be said. It's different for American movies, or even British or French films - the story telling is, for the most part, linear - there's a beginning, a middle and an end; what should remain implicit does. That's totally reversed in Asian stuff, at least the Asian stuff I've seen. Thus, I have never warmed to Asian cinema. Strangely enough, I don't see this quite so widespread in Asian books - loved Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, for instance. Just something confined to film perhaps, because of the nature of the medium. At any rate, I don't watch Asian films; it's probably not a very worldly mindset, but it's a peccadillo of mine. Hmmm, I guess this means that Sittha knew full well which DVD had tagged along with the two he was lending me...the little sneak. He said to me, and I quote, "Yeah, I think there's an extra one in there, but I'm not sure which." Uh huh. Crafty. It's hard having such a cosmopolitan friend, when you yourself are a bit of an unsophisticate. Oh what the hey, I'm totally unsophisticated!

Final thought: Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. Lao Kiun