I just love those Korean film names. In English it’s Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring. I was going to tell you this is a great film and doesn’t have any shocking violence in it at all, but watching it left me a bit unimpressed. It’s about Buddhism, and its whole ethos is very very Buddhist, and Buddhism doesn’t impress me very much. I want to learn something when I see a film, but this one was very well done, beautifully shot, thoughtful, intelligent and commanding throughout, without inspiring any new synaptic responses in my head whatever. Which is how I feel about Buddhism. It doesn’t go anywhere. Not that the progress of any other religions or unreligious schools of thought is necessarily especially easy to discern, but Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (wish I could say that) is very explicit about not only the continuity of the cycles of life, but the total sameness of human development at the same time. One person gets wise, and then they die and the next person gets wise, and so on. I prefer to think we are getting somewhere as a group, so we can look forward to Moschiach, or the Singularity, as they call it in science.

Also watched the first episode of Firefly. I intend to persevere a bit further, but so far I am highly suspicious that Joss Wheedon’s vision in this one is seriously flawed, possibly even to Christabellian standards. The entire plot, which was in his head from the start and finishes up in the movie Serenity, is based on uncovering the information that the future perfect society has created the monsters that threaten it. Which is obvious and not worth hingeing your suspense on. Also the parallels with world politics are thumping, if you read it that way, and thumpingly wrong, too. Given that the TV series obviously cost a fortune, if it only appealed to a marginal audience, it was doomed from the start. Good narrative needs resilient, universal vision, and good sci-fi even more so.

So, here is a picture from the Buddhist movie film (just when an immigrant gets used to saying “movie”, she ends up watching loads of artsey stuff that has to be called “film” again).