Just a few things need to be said here. First off, I am an American and have served my country in the Marine Corps a long time ago. I love my country for the most part with a few exceptions but that conversation is not for this blog, just trying to lay some ground work here. I love American movies too but they have always been held back by the MPAA. I despise the MPAA for a few reasons but the biggest reason is they are just a form of censorship that needs to end. It is my honest opinion that filmmakers should have complete autonomy when they are making a film. The way my little brain sees things is "If you don't like it, Don't watch it". There are plenty of movies out there that I personally do not like but I don't make it a point to complain about and try to stop others from watching it. 22 years ago Anthrax said it best..."Censorship's against everything America stands for". I 100% agree.
So that long shit being said...Brings me to my point. About 12 years or so ago while I lived in southern California, just a short ways from Los Angeles I found a small store called The Anime Club. I never went in it because the windows of the store were covered with posters of stuff like Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and Naruto and other such things that I didn't and still don't like. The reason I even started to go in there was they removed a poster and had a small table with Godzilla toys on it. Inside I found it was mostly all non-American films like Japanese, French, Russian and a ton more. I think I went through every single shelf and looked at every movie in the place, that says alot because the way they had it setup was you could only see the spine of all the films and all the writing was obviously foreign to me. Every week I bought 1 or 2 films, ones that caught my eye by either the cover art or if it was a copy that had a small synopsis in English on the back.
I found that America is the only country, for the most part, with a severe ratings board on films. All the films I saw, from all different countries would have been torn apart by the MPAA. I really learned to love these flicks. I had to watch them all in there real language with subtitles, which before I never would have done because like so many Americans I hated to read while watching a movie. But I realized dubbing sucks asshole. How can people like to watch a film with English dubbed over the voices of the actors? It turns every film, I mean every film, into a comedy.
Fast forward to the present and I have seen so many foreign films that I think they have surpassed the American ones. Well, maybe not but it has been alot. I do hate it when American filmmakers decide to remake a foreign flick and absolutely destroy it. Why can't we just release the movie that was already made in the theater over here? A few examples of badly remade Japanese movies is Dark Water and The Ring. The Ring was "okay" to me but the original is much scarier. One that was badly remade and was also remade by the same director was The Grudge. Originally titled Ju-on, this remake was an absolute piece of shit when compared to the Japanese version. Ju-on remains one of the single creepiest flicks I have ever seen. I have a good story about that but that will wait for another day. I am very worried about the American remake of a Korean film called Oldboy for this reason. I urge every person who reads this to watch the original first as it is a spectacular film. I think it's even on Netflix now so no excuses. Really not just that one though, watch all movies in their original forms before watching the remakes then make up your own mind which is better. I so far prefer originals.
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