Two episodes in, and this is just plain astonishing, high-quality material. It focuses on a period of Korean history and global geopolitics that wound up defining the 20th Century, but from the...
Two episodes in, and this is just plain astonishing, high-quality material. It focuses on a period of Korean history and global geopolitics that wound up defining the 20th Century, but from the perspectives of both upper and lower-class characters.
Initially, there's an intriguing parallel drawn between American slavery and Korean serfdom. It's a period when Josean (Korean) governance was stagnant, and the country was meat for colonial powers to fight over. You've got class struggle and independence movements, Montague vs Capulet romance stories, glorious and tragic battles, global power plays featuring Germany, France, the U.S., Russia, China and Japan...
The visual storytelling draws on multiple cinematic sources - every Hong Kong movie Chow Yun-Fat has ever appeared in, from The Killer to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Right Stuff; Gallipoli and Band of Brothers; Akira Kurosawa's Ran, and probably others that I don't have the scope to recognize. Whatever Mr. Sunshine derives from, it manages to make new.
The heroes and heroines (no shortage of strong female characters) have conflicting loyalties, the villains are multi-dimensional, and there's no telling how this goulash is going to taste by the end.
I'm incredibly excited to keep watching. [Spoiler: there is no character so far who could possibly be referred to as "Mr. Sunshine" without irony.]
Mister Sunshine (미스터 선샤인) is a really good drama if you can get past a little cheesiness (that said, it's nowhere near as cheesy as most korean dramas). The production quality is very good, the...
Mister Sunshine (미스터 선샤인) is a really good drama if you can get past a little cheesiness (that said, it's nowhere near as cheesy as most korean dramas). The production quality is very good, the story is entrancing, and the main actors/actresses did a hell of a job. 김태리 is also insanely beautiful.
The show is set in the 조선 (Joseon) dynasty and reflects on Korea's struggle in history with the US, Russia, and Japan using Korea as a proxy. What Japan did to Korea is heart-wrenching and I believe they get a free pass from the international society because not many people really know East Asian history. Japan and Korea still have tense relations due to Japan's terrible handling of the Korean comfort women situation.
intriguing parallel drawn between American slavery and Korean serfdom
AFAIK there wasn't a racial reason for Korea's slaves, they were just the lower class vs the upper elites / yangbans (양반). Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm currently 2/3 of the way through Korea's Place in the Sun by Bruce Cummings and it's portrayed as a class issue. So there is a parallel but it's different.
Anyway, slaves couldn't hold family names, so when they were freed they chose family names that the elites had. Which is why there are so many Koreans with 김 (Kim), 박 (Park), 조 (Cho/Jo), 최 (Choi/Joi), etc.
Through Episode 4, and it's holding up reasonably well, though it's got some soap opera-scale romances brewing in the storyline. As you indicated, there's cheesiness and unnecessarily prolonged...
Through Episode 4, and it's holding up reasonably well, though it's got some soap opera-scale romances brewing in the storyline. As you indicated, there's cheesiness and unnecessarily prolonged dramatic pausing, but I'll give those a pass since the violence isn't as gratuitously portrayed as an American drama would have done.
And yes, most of the leading actors and actresses are almost superhumanly pretty.
I'll look out for the Cummings book - the place of Korea in the power struggles that framed the 20th Century is overlooked, to my understanding.
I think Americans still have some awareness of the depredations of the Japanese in Korea and China, particularly the sex slavery, biological warfare experiments on civilians, and deliberate genocidal starvation, though these things have become less well-taught over time. The U.S. has problems coming to terms with its own troubling history of persecuting citizens of Asian descent before and during WW II.
AFAIK there wasn't a racial reason for Korea's slaves, they were just the lower class vs the upper elites / yangbans (양반).
That's why I referred to Korean slaves as serfs - it's a term for the feudal peasant laborers of European history who were territorial property of aristocrats as a class. This was usually enforced through debt bondage, not on the basis of race. I don't think Joseon had a tradition of slave markets, where people could be sold and traded away from the families and manors of their birth - that was the one of the gruesome innovations of Western chattel slavery.
That piece of information about Korean family names is interesting. Where European peasants took place names or adopted the names of their trades (Smith, Schmidt, Taylor, etc.), American slaves were often forced or sometimes chose to take the surnames of their masters' families.
Two episodes in, and this is just plain astonishing, high-quality material. It focuses on a period of Korean history and global geopolitics that wound up defining the 20th Century, but from the perspectives of both upper and lower-class characters.
Initially, there's an intriguing parallel drawn between American slavery and Korean serfdom. It's a period when Josean (Korean) governance was stagnant, and the country was meat for colonial powers to fight over. You've got class struggle and independence movements, Montague vs Capulet romance stories, glorious and tragic battles, global power plays featuring Germany, France, the U.S., Russia, China and Japan...
The visual storytelling draws on multiple cinematic sources - every Hong Kong movie Chow Yun-Fat has ever appeared in, from The Killer to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Right Stuff; Gallipoli and Band of Brothers; Akira Kurosawa's Ran, and probably others that I don't have the scope to recognize. Whatever Mr. Sunshine derives from, it manages to make new.
The heroes and heroines (no shortage of strong female characters) have conflicting loyalties, the villains are multi-dimensional, and there's no telling how this goulash is going to taste by the end.
I'm incredibly excited to keep watching. [Spoiler: there is no character so far who could possibly be referred to as "Mr. Sunshine" without irony.]
Mister Sunshine (미스터 선샤인) is a really good drama if you can get past a little cheesiness (that said, it's nowhere near as cheesy as most korean dramas). The production quality is very good, the story is entrancing, and the main actors/actresses did a hell of a job. 김태리 is also insanely beautiful.
The show is set in the 조선 (Joseon) dynasty and reflects on Korea's struggle in history with the US, Russia, and Japan using Korea as a proxy. What Japan did to Korea is heart-wrenching and I believe they get a free pass from the international society because not many people really know East Asian history. Japan and Korea still have tense relations due to Japan's terrible handling of the Korean comfort women situation.
AFAIK there wasn't a racial reason for Korea's slaves, they were just the lower class vs the upper elites / yangbans (양반). Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm currently 2/3 of the way through Korea's Place in the Sun by Bruce Cummings and it's portrayed as a class issue. So there is a parallel but it's different.
Anyway, slaves couldn't hold family names, so when they were freed they chose family names that the elites had. Which is why there are so many Koreans with 김 (Kim), 박 (Park), 조 (Cho/Jo), 최 (Choi/Joi), etc.
Through Episode 4, and it's holding up reasonably well, though it's got some soap opera-scale romances brewing in the storyline. As you indicated, there's cheesiness and unnecessarily prolonged dramatic pausing, but I'll give those a pass since the violence isn't as gratuitously portrayed as an American drama would have done.
And yes, most of the leading actors and actresses are almost superhumanly pretty.
I'll look out for the Cummings book - the place of Korea in the power struggles that framed the 20th Century is overlooked, to my understanding.
I think Americans still have some awareness of the depredations of the Japanese in Korea and China, particularly the sex slavery, biological warfare experiments on civilians, and deliberate genocidal starvation, though these things have become less well-taught over time. The U.S. has problems coming to terms with its own troubling history of persecuting citizens of Asian descent before and during WW II.
That's why I referred to Korean slaves as serfs - it's a term for the feudal peasant laborers of European history who were territorial property of aristocrats as a class. This was usually enforced through debt bondage, not on the basis of race. I don't think Joseon had a tradition of slave markets, where people could be sold and traded away from the families and manors of their birth - that was the one of the gruesome innovations of Western chattel slavery.
That piece of information about Korean family names is interesting. Where European peasants took place names or adopted the names of their trades (Smith, Schmidt, Taylor, etc.), American slaves were often forced or sometimes chose to take the surnames of their masters' families.