Columbus: Korean-American Comes Home

Admittedly, the presence of the Korean language in Columbus is primarily a handful of international phone calls held by Jin (John Cho), a book translator who has returned to the States to care for his ailing father (Joseph Anthony Foronda), a noted scholar, but Columbus also touches upon the cultural differences between American and South Korean cultures on many fronts and is really such an exquisite film in its own unique way that it seems appropriate to bend the rules of this blog and include it. After all, Park Chan-wook's Hollywood entry Stoker and the dry tutorial The Great Courses: The World's Greatest Churches: Two Churches in Seoul, Korea are both part of Korean Grindhouse, too, and neither is nearly as good as Kogonada's exquisite indie flick.

What makes Columbus so special? Oh, many things like how it avoids turning its central relationship between Jin and Cassandra (Haley Lu Richardson), an architecture nerd, into a romance; how it similarly avoids sex scenes between these characters and a friend of the family (Parker Posey) and a librarian (Rory Culkin) respectively; how it spends so much time talking about ideas especially as they relate to architecture — most memorably to the work of Eero Saarinen, his father Eliel Saarinen, and the lesser-known Deborah Berke. The movie makes you realize how often traditional films ignore the myriad relationships available to men and women, parent and child, peer and peer, person and place. The cinematography by Elisha Christian is also worth noting as it so successfully uses the striking buildings and interiors of the film's hometown for truly remarkable framework again and again and again. I can't recommend this one enough.