America's Isolationist Media Policy

It dawned on me yesterday that we as a culture are very isolated from the rest of the world. We worship Hollywood and really don't seem to accept anything else. The music genre is an acceptable causality as there is often times a language barrier and most people like understanding their favorite band's lyrics (unless your a Death Metal or Nirvana fan).

Movies can't use this excuse however. Movies have the ability to supply subtitles that magically translate foreign languages into English. Just because you can't understand the actors spoken words you can still judge their acting. Many countries have their own, some times enormous, film industries (China and India are huge players), yet they still watch our movies. In fact Titanic once held the top grossing movie spot in China until the historical action-epic Red Cliff usurped it.


I'm very curious about these movies now. The only foreign films I am really familiar with are some famous British films and some Asian martial-arts/action films. What are we missing? Why does it take so long for many of these films to become legally accessible to Americans? Why are the American versions always chopped up and nowhere near as good or complete as the International versions? Honestly I really hope this changes soon because I hate to have to watch a pirated copy of Red Cliff since the international version is impossible to find in stores.

Note: The international version is 4 1/2 hours long consisting of two films. The American version is cut down to two hours in one film... should explain my dilemma.