A blast from Asia

In this update, we have two new lists to share with you, a major update of the UNESCO list, and a new feature that’s available for all users in the beta version of the site. First and foremost, however, we’d like to welcome max-scl, who is joining the iCheckMovies moderator team.

The Philippines have historically been fertile ground for film making. It has one of the oldest film industries in Asia and cinema attendance has always been very high. So, besides being attractive as a place to film action movies on the cheap for foreign production companies, there has been a strong homegrown element of both studio and independent output. In the current century there has been lots of International praise for the likes of Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza, but trailblazers like Lino Brocka, Kidlat Tahimik or Ismael Bernal are hardly forgotten. All those and much more are represented in Pinoy Rebyu’s 100 Greatest Pinoy Films of All Time; a long overdue addition to our roster of official country lists. It’s based on a poll amongst 81 Filipino directors, screenwriters, critics, scholars, programmers, and archivists from 2013.

At times we at iCM just like to be entertained with some blazing guns, fierce fights, big explosions, death defying stunts and screeching car chases; in other words with a good ol’ action movie. Action is a genre with wide appeal and big commercial successes all over the world. The genre has such enormous popularity that it made some of the biggest stars in both Hollywood and Hong Kong, like
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Therefore we feel the genre deserves another more recent list next to Marshall Julius’s Action! The Action Movie A-Z. TimeOut polled over 50 experts (i.e. directors, action stars and critics) including Danny Trejo himself. Not wanting our heads getting chopped off by a machete, we adopted Time Out’s 101 Best Action Movies Ever Made.

The Unesco-list has been expanded with a 114 movies. This list has never been complete and still isn’t. On the original list there are some unclear entries, like movies that are not on IMDb and we can’t find enough (or any) info about and collections of movies for which it’s unclear which movies are part of it. Lately we found enough info about two Canadian entries (special thanks to Harco, who did most of the digging): “Canadian Cameo Series” and “Shorts produced at the London headquarters of the Canadian army during the last war”. Both collections are still not completely on the list, but most have been added first to IMDb and then to iCM. Also 35 entries from the Ecuadorian shorts collection have been added to the list. If you want to help in our search please contact joachimt.

There’s a new feature which gives everyone the ability to update IMDb-info on iCM-pages.
If you see a missing or incorrect runtime, director, genre or AKA title, you can update that info yourself. Note that you can’t edit info, you can only make iCM extract the info from IMDb. You also can’t fix duplicates yourself; so if you find any of those, you can post them here.
How does it work? Go to the beta-page of a movie. Click the button with the three dots. Click “Update info”. If anything doesn’t work like you would expect, feel free to ask here for help.

Enjoy the new lists and update! Happy checking and stay safe!

The iCheckMovies team