Too painful to watch
As always, I commend the great acting of all Chinese actors. No matter what I watch they never fail to deliver.But this is the end of my praise.
I picked this title because of the director. I had watched his 2018 direction of "The Story of Minglan", and I was in awe: what a story, what great development of story line and characters, what drama upon drama and next to another drama. It was rich, rounded, shocking, enchanting and most of all entertaining, with actors that delivered to the tilt, turning even support roles in rich characters to remember. I re watched that series two times more, and it never failed to enchant me, though I knew or even more so since I knew the story.
And here I am at episode 9 of this "Serenade to Joy" and ready to quit it.
I have no words for how underwhelming this work is.
It took eight episodes to solve a so called conflict, which was not even fully developed or exploited as a conflict, between son, birth mother and foster mother. The dialogue was lame, the action was lame. No drive whatsoever.
And while I cherish the fact that people bother to provide us, outsiders, with English subtitles, I have to stand by one Chinese reviewer who protested for having the English subtitles covering the Chinese characters. It was a first for me too. All other Chinese dramas I watched had the two languages clearly visible separately.
I believe that our convenience, of being able to read in English, should not be won at the expense of the Chinese not being able to read in Chinese.
Regarding translation, I also have to point out that it was cumbersome, too pedanting in willing to transfer to English all of the subtleties of the Chinese dialogues. Translating for movies is different than translating for a book: one has to drop complexity of language and meaning to facilitate understanding. Soooo many times I had to stop the video and go back a few frames in order to read the many lines, in a not so fluent English. Sometimes even that action did not further my understanding of the translation.
Too bad. A lot of good people put a lot of good work into all of this, and yet the result is heartbreaking.
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