Catching-up with Wai Kar Fai and Johnnie To's Mad Detective Trailer.

I know, it's been offered around online for several days. Tried downloading it, and single-figure download speeds simply don't do it for me - hey, soon we'll have video, which was news to me - so I picked up YouTube and gave it a try. Bingo.

Anyway, I'm here on a tuesday morning after a long weekend of frustrating unintentional experiments left my main source of online activity out of action since Thursday night. Has me thinking though, that although it's easy to see how things blow out of proportion very easily with a little instantaneous excitement to the appearance of a new snippet, once things have a few days to cool down they boil down to very little. Still, it's important for the most part, to distinguish that there's still important issues ongoing that require attention, and there's stuff people get excited about because they need to lift their heads (and perhaps suggest others do also) to look out of the window doubtless somewhere near you in the room, and take a look at the outside world. Once in a while, at least, even if not every thirty seconds or so.

Catching-up then, what've I missed out on? New Production I.G anime with Shirow Masamune called 'Real Drive' - great, too little distinctive anime around, still waiting on a late-looking USA disc for 'Paprika' from Satoshi Kon, new TV to arrive to make the most of 'Tekkon Kinkreet' on Blu-ray - which is something that easily distinguishes itself. New Wisit Sasanatieng, which is nice, because I think 'Citizen Dog' is a clever piece of filmmaking if a little familiarly odd at times. Miike's 'Sukiyaki Western Django' is trimmed for International release version - nice, so, I'll buy the Japanese DVD then? Still no 'Zebraman' DVD, or all those others, still no Tokyo Zombie either. No Shamo' DVD yet. Still, none of this is that important in many respects, not as much as many issued online communities have long since tired of talking about.

Ultimately, there's still things missing from the slate, still things people are picking-up on out of the masses of foreign releases and talking about online which you may or may not get to see in any kind of form somewhere down the line. Odd, isn't it? I get the impression companies do come online and use the internet to some extent, but they're not here daily, they're not necessarily aware of all the ports of call for information, and they're not necessarily that interested in the opportunities it presents to access a much larger audience - more have internet access than film festival access after all, more are building and growing their knowledge than simply waiting to plow into DVDs of films they're aware of from their distant past. Shame, but kind of predictable by now...

Mad Detective Trailer at YouTube.