DVD outlets deserve kudos, too

I just received this e-mail, which I assume was in response to a column I wrote about moviegoing in Spokane.

Dear Dan Webster: I think kudos should also go to Hastings, especially the Lincoln Heights store, for their fairly decent selection of foreign films.

As a K-film fan (editor’s note: Korean-film fan, we presume), I would never have seen the complete “Vengeance” series, or “Musa the Warrior,” “ Spider Forest ,” “ Yi Yi ,” (Taiwanese/Japanese) “Save the Green Earth,” “Three Iron,” “Face,” ” Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring Again ” or “Untold Scandal.”

Not that I liked them all, but they were there. Now a new glitch has developed called DVD Region Codes . Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle addressed this in late December. I encountered it when obtaining the three disc version of “King and Clown” (a box-office hit in Korea, outranked by “Host”) from YesAsia.

My old iMac Blueberry could play the Region 3 extended version, but no luck on a regular DVD player. Anyhow, I am now on the lookout for an-all region DVD player. A lot of people in Spokane do not seem aware of this problem, which could get worse. Anyhow, keep up the good work.

– Barbara Morrissey, Spokane

Dear Barbara: Thanks for the note. I still miss Street Music, Jack Lindbergh’s ground-breaking little store that boasted several hundred art-house and foreign-language films. It’s nice to know that at least some local stores are attempting to fill their shelves with something other than the latest Hollywood jetsam.

I discovered the region-coded DVD situation several years ago when I tried to buy some DVDs in Florence, Italy. Seems those Region 2 DVDs wouldn’t work on my U.S. (or Region 1) player.

I looked around at the time for an all-region player. But I stopped when the MPAA came out with an announcement that they were going to program Region 1 DVDs so that they wouldn’t play on all-region machines. Which meant that I would have had to buy two machines: one to play U.S.-produced DVDs, and one to play anything I would have purchased from overseas.

Let me know what comes of your search.