From The Ashes Dept.

Back at A-KON this year, I blundered into a somewhat weatherbeaten copy of a DVD that at first didn't seem to have an English title. It took some squinting and peering at the thing under a strong light to make out the name Ashes of Time on the face of the disc.

I almost broke my own fingers digging out my wallet.

Ashes of Time was maverick Hong Kong director Kar-Wai Wong's foray into martial-arts epic territory, and it had roughly the same trajectory as a movie like Blade Runner. It was costly and long in the making, and a test of patience for all involved. Greeted with hostility and poor box office take on its release, it languished in obscurity at first but built up a cult following; in this case, fans of the director's other movies learned about it and sought out what few copies could be found on home video.

A decade ago, Wong started to buy up as many prints of the movie as he could find, since the original negatives had been stored poorly and were now disintegrating. For five years he poured his own money and sweat into restoring the movie, and it's now being released into theaters thanks to the good graces of Sony Pictures Classics.

From the New York Times:

When Mr. Wong set out to make “Ashes” in the early 1990s, it was a boom time in the Hong Kong film industry, which was churning out more than 200 features a year. And he was tapping into a resurgence in wuxia pictures with this adaptation of Louis Cha’s celebrated multipart novel, “The Eagle-Shooting Heroes,” published in 1957-59. The novel featured two older antagonists, Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi; Mr. Wong concocted a prequel that reimagined them as younger men and told how failed romance and emotional reticence sealed their fates. “I wanted to make them more human,” he said.

Odds are the remastered version will be released on DVD as well. When it is, I plan on sitting down with it, along with a copy of the original, and giving both of them their day in the sun.