SHŌGUNATION

— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ तिहत्तर — The highlight since I last updated was that Shobhit and I watched the first two episodes of the FX series Shogun on Hulu, and it was great. I already have a favorite line: "I've had enough of your Christian nonsense." Ha! I only knew about this series because podcasters I listen to talked about how excited they were about it. I knew absolutely nothing about the story's legacy: first published as a novel in 1975 by an Australian author baned James Clavell, apparently a huge bestseller; then adapted into a 1980 NBC miniseries, apparently a giant cultural event, nearly on par with Roots (that one I have heard of). I must say, though, that I am perfectly happy for this new iteration to be the first I have been exposed to, particularly considering the novel and original minieries were presented from the point of view of John Blackthorne, the English navigator whose ship runs ashore in 1600 Japan. In this version, although Blackthorne remains a major and key figure, the story is contextualized almost exclusively from the point of view of the Japanese people. This makes the current show very much an Asian-majority cast, who actually speak Japanese most of the time—apparently this also happened with the 1980 miniseries, but without subtitles (because in that version we are meant to experience it from Blackthorne's eyes)—and we get nearly all of what they say translated in subtitles. The one kind of weird thing is that, among the White characters, there are English and Portuguese people, their status as enemies to each other another key plot point. For some reason, when we are meant to understand the White characters are actually speaking Portuguese, the actors speak in English. I was telling Noah about that this morning, and I'm kind of on the same page with him when his basic reaction was: why? We've got tons of subtitles for real Japanese being spoken, what reason is there not to have actors actually speaking Portuguese? I can think of two reasons, neither of which are great reasons in my opinion. One of them is: with Portuguese actually spoken as such by the White actors, very little actual English would be spoken onscreen, because the English characters speak Portuguese, but the Portguguese characters do not speak English. (So what?) The other is: perhaps the idea is that keeping all the White people equally understandable draws a stronger delineation between Western and Eastern characters. (Why is that so important?) That quibble aside, the way it handles language somewhat illogically still works, and the show is very compelling so far. I'm really looking forward to having a new episode to see every week for the next eight weeks. — पाँच हजार पाँच सौ तिहत्तर — — पाँच हजार पाँच सौ तिहत्तर — Shobhit and I decided to make pasta for dinner last night, choosing angel hair noodles and adding chopped eggplant that might have otherwise gone bad to the pasta sauce. Those noodles really absorbed the pasta sauce and it could have taken a whole second jar, really. Nonetheless, it was super tasty and we both had too much of it, resulting in a slight increase in weight for both of us this morning. Shobhit wanted to get our tax filing done last night and thus resisted turning the show on at first. But, we were obviously not going to do the taxes while eating, so I turned on the first episode when we sat down to eat. We broke between episodes to take care of the taxes, which Shobhit needed to have done by tomorrow before apparently the filing fee goes up (this was why he wasn't waiting until the filing deadline of April 15). We got through it surprisingly quickly, though, and then moved right on to the second episode of Shogun. This new show's creators are a married couple, by the way: Rachel Kondo, who (thankfully) is of Japanese descent, and Justin Marks, who is White. Marks also wrote the screenplay for the wonderful 2016 live action version of The Jungle Book, and was co-writer on Top Gun Maverick. This new Shogun is getting nearly universal critical acclaim and, so far, I'd say it's deserved. That is, in spite of what I found to be a bit of variance when it comes to actor performances; I like some better than others. But the storytelling is really fantastic, as is the production value. — पाँच हजार पाँच सौ तिहत्तर — [posted 12:31 pm]