Maybe the fact that I haven't seen any old 1970s Japanese films plays a role in my lack of appreciation for Zatoichi, then. Unless you count the Woman in the Sand one (or whatever the name is), which is a totally different genre anyway.

Yeah, exactly. Though as of this week, our public channels are going to offer the choice between subtitles or not, apparently - I'm not sure how that works, but it sounds good. We also have a legendary sketch on the topic, with a guy with a heavy Western-Flemish accent complaining about how West-Flemings are always subtitled - and of course he too is subtitled. Then he comes back, this time to complain about how he was made to look like a fool by having his rant against subtitling subtitled. It's hilarious, but fairly untranslatable obviously, as you need to understand both the speech and the original subtitles to get it.

Indeed. And there's just that many more of them being made. The Flemish market isn't big enough to make many movies for, even if some of those movies then have some limited success abroad, dubbed or with subtitles.

Heh, yeah.

It was.

*nods* Fair enough, you certainly seem to go out of your way to see good foreign movies, judging by how many you've seen...