Disability jdoramas used to be all the rage back in the day but are not so common anymore. I have a soft spot for Kawaguchi Haruna ever since Juken no Cinderella. I am so glad we are no longer in the bad acting era of Gouriki Ayame and Ueto Aya. There is no overpushed young actress who can't act except maybe Araki Yuko.
Pretty roomy 2LDK apartment assuming this is Tokyo area on salary of 2 freeters? Everytime I see huge apartments in jdoramas I want to know how how much of their salary they spend on rent. Reason is I watched Japanese apartment videos on youtube like
naiken Johnny and you see all the small and cheap apartments that Japanese live in but you don't see them in jdoramas. Weird how Kawaguchi Haruna's brother keeps wanting her to move out. Do the parents own the apartment or something or does the brother have a housemate in mind. I am asking too many questions that the dorama will not answer.
Silent is about this idiot who is dating Kawaguchi Haruna after his best friend dumped her because he was going deaf but idiot keeps looking for his best friend because his friend is more important than his relationship. Of course there would not be a story if he didn't try or would there but he is not helping himself in the smarts department.
I am enjoying the Spitz music because I like Spitz. I don't love them like a lot of Japanese. My favourite is Masayumi, the theme song for Medaka, a Mimura dorama which I need to rewatch one day.
Nooo, why is Kaho playing another supporting character girlfriend who will get dumped after watching her in First Love? She deserves to be main actress in jdoramas dammit! Wait, maybe she is just a friend to Kawaguchi Haruna's ex. Can't complain about acting talent in this show.
Has Shinohara Ryoko moved into the mom phase of her career? This makes me feel old. Kimutaku still hasn't really moved into the dad phase. He has played a dad once in BG but he was not very dad-like.
The climax of the episode is Kawaguchi Haruna catching the ex-bf and him signing to her that he cannot hear her. The cynic in me says says that ex-bf should have just typed out the words and used his mobile to speak but of course it would not be as dramatic. Still, it was a good and effective scene.
Watchable first episode. I think how good Silent will be will depend on how interesting the side characters can be because we know how the main story will go. Thanks to irozuku subs for subbing the whole thing and you can get the hardsubs from their website.
I dropped Silent after five episodes, some of the dialogue was inane, and the FL kept getting shafted by two insecure men. Also, the male lead can't act, and the other guy was miscast (he looked like Kawaguchi's younger brother - they even made a joke about it, which wasn't funny). I didn't feel any of them had any chemistry. But there were others who loved it and apparently the drama got better in the later episodes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there was some controversy about the scriptwriter, who wasn't happy about the drama's international release, and said she wanted people who understood Japanese to watch her dramas.
I personally enjoyed Silent, even though the two male leads definitely showed how more green they were in the acting department (Kaho and some others sorta made up for the acting talent here). I like the way Silent was shot, and how the story had some of the finer details that subverted our expectations of a typical disability love drama (Aishiteru to Itte Kure comes to mind, a classic even though it was made way back in the 90s lol).
ReplyDeleteI also watched the conversation where the scriptwriter of the show said she wouldn't be too happy if the show was released to an international audience who don't understand Japanese. This is because they won't be able to get all the cultural nuances without Japanese comprehension and that would be doing the show as well as the audience themselves a disservice. What she said could be grating to some, but I can relate to why she feels the way she does. In my years of subtitling dramas/movies, I have struggled to translate nuances in the Japanese language into English and reading the translation is almost always inferior to experiencing them in the native language itself (I'm probably biased here though).
That said, the way the scriptwriter shared her thoughts probably wasn't the most tactful, but I appreciate her frankness.