best 80's and 90's Japanese movies ? Please post more

[Mile Films]

Instead of petitions to US distributors, I think we'd all love to hear what
you'd like to see shown in the US. I can give you the names and addresses or
email addresses of some of the other US distributors if anybody likes. Many of
the emails on this list, by the way, go to our acquisitions colleague (who is
Japanese so she can write to the companies and see unsubtitled films as well)
and we've seen many of them. By the way, it hasn't been announced, but an
American company did just pick up The Eel (I prefer if they announce it since
it's they're coup).

However, there are some underlying problems why some things are not
distributed here in the states:

Japanese distributors can be difficult to deal with and many of the films we'd
love to get have either monetary advances too expensive for the market to
bear, the prints are too costly (usually $5000- $7000 a piece unsubtitled
compared to $1300 - $2000 elsewhere in the world), or the royalty percentages
are unreasonable. Additionally, many of the companies we (don't) deal with
insist on a new video master being made rather than to make a dupe of their
master. And the subtitling they do in Japan is way behind today's standards.
You can note that most of the Japanese film's we've done recently (Antonio
Gaudi, Woman in the Dunes, Village of Dreams, Maborosi and Village of Dreams)
are all independently produced and owned. 

This is not to say there's not advances. We've recently had several very
pleasant conversations with Daiei, Toho and Shochiku. Who knows what's in the
future? 

The last reason is that many of the small companies like us only pick up five
to six films a year -- it doesn't leave much room for mistakes or films we
think are uncommercial, or worse yet, a wide variety of films from around the
world. I'm amazed how many of our films are from Japan to tell the truth and a
little guilty about all the other world cinemas I've ignored.

Dennis Doros
Milestone Film & Video