Were you one of those people who liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but didn’t think it was as awesome as everyone else made it out to be? Perhaps you wanted a little bit more to your dramatic action movie? Then I think Hero is the movie for you.

You must see this movie! It is amazing. Last year it was even nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. How many times do you hear that about a Chinese Jet Li action movie? The cinematography is beautiful. Color is used to an amazing degree in this film. The plot is also a lot like Crouching Tiger meets Rashomon, only with a hell of a lot more action. It is great, you’ve got to believe me.

But where do you see it though? Currently Miramax has the rights to it in the United States and they have no immediate plans to release it in theaters any time soon. Which means that a DVD release is really far off in the future. To give you some perspective, Miramax also owns the rights to Shoulin Soccer, which was suppose to have been released in theaters at least three times already and yet Miramax keeps pushing the date back for some reason. Hero isn’t going to come out until after Shoulin Soccer, so you’ve got a while to wait in the States. What to do then?

I got in the mail today a Region 9 DVD that I found on Ebay. The picture and sound are excellent. Everything is in Chinese, including the menus, so that makes it a little hard to find where the English subtitles are, but with a little trial and error you can find them no problem, and what is even better is that the subtitles seem to read perfectly, meaning this probably isn’t some cheap bootleg copy. The text before the film isn’t translated for some reason, but if you really want to know what it says I can just tell you. What’s best about the DVD though? It’s only about ten bucks! At a price that low you have no excuse for not buying this movie. You can find it pretty easily on Ebay, and a friend of mine said he saw it in a video store that dealt with imports. This movie is so awesome you just have to pick it up. You can’t wait for Miramax to get off of its lazy ass. Get it. You won’t regret it.