Weinstein on Hero

Since I spend so much time bashing Miramax and their treatment of Asian films, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to Harvey W.'s letter. Much of it sounds plausible, and I'd be tempted to believe it if not for Miramax's track record. Also, this bit on piracy rankles:

Some people have suggested that the availability of illegal imports of "Hero" on the Internet would have an effect on the box office. Clearly this was not the case and in fact our surveys showed that few audience members had seen the film on DVD. We have successfully cracked down on this practice, and have kept the sales of these DVDs to a few hundred enterprising Asian film fans. Piracy is a hugely important issue for our business and I realize now that concerns about piracy in China may have led the producers to release the film as soon as it was completed.

That would be cracking down on people purchasing imported official Chinese releases of the DVDs, thank you very much. Allow me to annotate:

We have successfully cracked down on this practice, and have kept the sales of these [legal imports of legitimate Chinese-release] DVDs to a few hundred enterprising Asian film fans. Piracy is a hugely important issue for our business and I realize now that concerns about piracy in China may have led the producers to release the film [on DVD] as soon as it was completed [to beat the rush of pirate DVDs saturating the market].

Note how Harvey takes two very real phenomenons--Asian film fans buying legitimate product and the booming pirate DVD market in Asian--and conflates them misleadingly.

I will allow that I could be wrong about the legality of buying DVDs from overseas, but I don't think I am. Can anyone confirm? « via Kung Fu Cinema (click through to read their editorial) »