This was a question that baffled me. I wanted to get as much Japanese input as possible. But it's very hard to get access to Japanese media in the UK (especially outside of London). I ordered some DVDs from amazon.co.jp but this proved to be extremely expensive and I had to pay tax.
The current solution to this problem, for me, is
LOVEFiLM. There's a two week free trial at the moment (though you still have to enter your card details, and if you don't quit before the two weeks are up then it automatically starts billing you. Anyway it's reasonably cheap £14 pounds a month for the option I chose)
LOVEFiLM is an online DVD rental place, like netflix in America.
The option I chose I can rent two DVDs at once. I chose some films (I can even queue up a selection). They send my the DVDs with a prepaid return envelope. I can hold on to these for as long as I like. When I send them back then they'll send me the next DVDs selected in my queue.
So far so good right? The last remaining question is - how many Japanese language films do they have? Well this is a hard one to answer because search by language is broken, this is super annoying and I almost didn't sign up because of this single issue. But if you find one Japanese film, then you can click on the director or actor and find linked films.
There seems to be a vast amount of Anime films and series, Yakuza and Horror . . . and not much else :( But I'll give it a go and I'll be updating this blog with info about the films I watch.
This is my list at the moment:
[15] 20th Century Boys
[15] Alive
[15] All About Lilly Chou-Chou
[18] Azumi
[15] Blood - The Last Vampire
[18] End Call
[15] Gantz - Vol. 1
[18] Graveyard Of Honour
[18] Infection
[15] Kai Doh Maru
[18] Legend Of Ando Family, The - The Road To...
[18] Marebito
[PG] Millennium Actress
[15] Shogun's Samurai
[18] Sonatine
[12] The Place Promised In Our Early Days
[18] The Triple Cross
[15] Tokyo Drifter
[18] Village Of Doom
[15] X-Cross
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| 20th Century Boys |
My current plan is to check these films out see what I like and once I run out I can just quit my subscription. It should work out far far cheaper than amazon with much greater variety. I can try to do something similar to Khatz's sampling 100 cantonese films in a month. Though I'm probably looking more 60ish is I have two dvd plan.
