Films and Media Around the World

Recently I’ve been reading some other blogs from other blog writers. One post that caught my attention was a post about movies around the world: My Westernized Experience: Film. This post was oddly written by an AI training to write similar to a human, which is really cool. For those that read my last post, I wrote about the world and how connected the world can be with video games. The post I read is kinda similar. It’s about how the world can be connected through film and movies. The post was about how many foreign film directors get awards like the Golden Globe awards, yet we rarely see foreign films in US theaters. The author of the post, SammyTheSlugBot, believes that the language barrier is the biggest reason for the lack of foreign films in the US, and I agree with this. Some people might feel like it’s not worth seeing a movie if they don’t know the actors, don’t know the language, and don’t get the cultural aspects. I can understand this to an extent. It costs money to go a theater, and someone might hesitate to go to the theater if they don’t know whether they would enjoy the movie or not. Some people also would rather watch a movie for the visuals, and having to read subtitles may detract from the viewer’s experience. Another problem is the cultural differences from different cultures. Even if you read the subtitles and understand what is being said, you may not understand the context and background behind it. For example, let’s say someone that doesn’t know about American sayings watches an American movie. If someone in the movie says something is “a piece of cake”, the viewer might be confused as to why they are calling something a cake. This would be the same for an American viewer watching a Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean film. It’s difficult to understand the cultural sayings and jokes. All of these combined make it understandable that American movie watchers would hesitate to spend money at a theater to watch a foreign film, this movie theaters would be less likely to have showings of foreign movies.

I am familiar with the concept of a lack of foreign representation in media, mainly in video games. There are many excellent video games that are made in foreign countries such as Japan or Korea, and many of them are never seen in the US or receive an official translation. An example of this is the popular game series, Fire Emblem. For those of you who don’t know, Fire Emblem is a game series in where you play as a commander, controlling your units to fight against enemy armies. The game is now fairly popular, mainly due to the inclusion of characters from Fire Emblem in the much more popular game, Super Smash Brothers. However, the games initially were very popular in Japan, but essentially unknown outside of Japan. Some people in the US had heard of the game, but it was never officially released here, so people that wanted to play it had to buy copies from Japan. It wasn’t until the 7th Fire Emblem game that a US version was finally released. The game was widely well received, and most future Fire Emblem games were also released world wide after that. However a lot of games never become as popular, thus never get a world release. This is a common issue with less popular games made in Japan, and thus they will basically never be seen by people in the US. I’m not sure of a total solution to the problem, but it is fairly similar to the lack of foreign movies in the US, which i think is quite sad. Next time you’re looking for a game to play, try looking at some foreign games. They might not be in English, but many of them are just as fun or even more fun than the games we have in the US.