Excellent news for local indie film auteur Jon Moritsugu: His 1993 flick, Terminal USA, will be available on Comcast On Demand for a month starting July 1.Listed as part of the “Cinema Asian America” package, the film will appear on On Demand menus in more than 50 cities, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Sacramento. (A full roster of locations is up on Moritsugu’s homepage.) Sadly, Santa Fe is absent from the list but, if you’re a Moritsugu die-hard, you can venture to Albuquerque to order it there.
It might not seem like a giant deal that a film is making it to Comcast On Demand—after all, it happens all the time—but Terminal USA’s appearance is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Moritsugu, who has been making movies since 1986 and is working on the post-production for Santa Fe-filmed Pig Death Machine, has been aiming to get a Comcast deal like this nailed down for a long time. Fortunately an acquaintance was hired to program content at Comcast.
Moritsugu’s filmmaking style is also very unconventional, prizing lo-fi aesthetics and bad taste—not exactly prime-time fare. Terminal USA pushes familial mores in an increasingly absurd fashion, its characters indulging in violence, sex and drugs.
The film, which appeared on PBS in the mid-'90s in censored form, was written by Moritsugu in just two days.
“It really breaks down and shatters the stereotypes of Asian Americans. It still holds up to this day," he says. "If you think about Asian Americans in the media and even television, it’s sort of like we get lumped together. We’re gardeners, we have an accent, we run the laundromat, we’re good at math—all that crap. This totally shatters every stereotype and it’s really progressive and just really flagrantly in-your-face that way.”
