Sometimes it pays to read the help files

I finally learned how to create notes in the GarageBand note editor instead of just copying them: You command-click where there is no note already. I would never have discovered that myself.

There already has to be a region created before you can make notes in it, though.

Why doesn't Hong Kong action play well in the US?

As an introduction to a review of a movie I never heard of, The Unknown Movies asks a question and gives an answer:

Why don't western film companies very often hire Asians who are skilled in making great fight scenes? And the few times they do hire Asians, why don't they leave them alone instead of heavily influencing them to make the fights more "western"? And why do the major Hollywood distributors hardly ever go to the trouble to simply find an Asian movie with great fights, buy the rights to it (for what would probably be considered peanuts), and release it to theaters on these shores?

[...James] Glickenhaus defended the way he directed The Protector, saying in effect that [Jackie] Chan's way was well and good, but the western market wouldn't go for it. And unfortunately, evidence seems to suggest he was right. Look at how Chan's Hong Kong movies have done here; Rumble At The Bronx did okay (certainly not blockbuster business), but subsequently the other theatrically released ones (like Supercop or The Legend Of Drunken Master) fared pretty poorly. Yet his inferior American-made movies like The Tuxedo and Rush Hour have fared much better! And it's not just with Chan. For example, few people here seemed interested in seeing Jet Li's Hong Kong movie Black Mask, but they showed a lot more interest in seeing him in the inferior western movies Kiss Of The Dragon and The One.

I'm not sure this is the whole answer. For one thing, Black Mask wasn't really that great (why couldn't they have released Fist of Legend instead?) but that's neither here nor there; the other movies listed fit the schema well. But when I read this passage to martial-arts-movie aficionado samantha2074, she pointed out that there's a chicken-and-egg situation here: those Asian movies were all given small American releases with relatively low-key publicity (Supercop a bit more than the rest), whereas Rush Hour and The Tuxedo were heavily hyped because the studios expected them to be more successful. There's an unwillingness to take the big risk, and even if they do, the studios don't know how to market these pictures. So we don't really know if they'd do better with better treatment.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the great anomaly, in that, while it's more like a Chinese movie than some of the American ones, it was made to play well to Western art-house and chick-movie crowds, which Hong Kong ass-kicking movies usually do not. The marketing campaign for the US release of Iron Monkey made it out to be just like Crouching Tiger, when in fact it's a completely different movie, weirder and zippier, with a goofy sense of humor and only a very understated romance element. Many Americans who went to see it were probably disappointed and confused.

(I think the reviewer also understates the amount of work that various Yuen brothers and their ilk have gotten in the US in the aftermath of The Matrix. But most of that work is action choreography in movies that hew more or less to Western action-movie traditions.)