Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin. Screenplay: Kogonada. Cinematography: Elisha Christian. Production design: Diana Rice. Film editing: Kogonada. Music: Hammock.

Kogonada's debut feature, Columbus, had a lot of critics scrounging for superlatives, one of them being a comparison to the films of the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Which is apt, considering that Kogonada is a pseudonym -- his birth name is a slyly guarded secret -- derived from that of Ozu's co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda. But the filmmaker that Columbus most reminded me of was Éric Rohmer, whose films, like Claire's Knee (1970) and My Night at Maud's (1969), typically center on a man and a woman talking. Sometimes sex is involved, but usually only as one of the things they talk about. The man in Columbus is Jin (John Cho), a Korean in early middle age who works as a translator of books in English. The woman is Cassandra, called Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), not long out of high school and working in a library until she decides on a course for her life. They meet in the small city of Columbus, Indiana, which is chiefly famous for the many buildings -- churches, banks, schools, and so on -- designed by famous architects like the Saarinens, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and others. Jin is in Columbus because his father, an architect, went there to give a lecture but suffered a stroke and is comatose in the hospital. Casey is there because she grew up in Columbus and hasn't yet decided to leave because her mother (Michelle Forbes) is a recovering drug addict. Jin is estranged from his father but bound against his will by Korean family tradition to stay near to him. Casey would like to leave Columbus and have a career, but she fears what may happen to her mother if she does. They're both single, though Jin has a longstanding crush on his father's assistant, Eleanor (Parker Posey), who accompanied his father to Columbus and remains there after his stroke. Casey is carrying on a flirtation with Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a co-worker at the library who's more interested in her than she is in him. Jin and Casey meet, he bums a cigarette from her -- there's an awful lot of smoking in the film, a reason why the film echoes French movies for me -- and they start to talk. Over the next few days in Columbus they will talk about architecture as they wander through some of the city's landmark buildings, and they will talk about life, family, culture, and so on. In a more conventional film, the talk would lead to romance, and there is a kind of spark between Jin and Casey, but Kogonada isn't interested in making a conventional film. Instead, he leaves us to ponder the substance of the talk, the beauty and function of architecture, and the nature of relationships. Which makes Columbus sound more abstract than it is: Cho, Richardson, and the rest of the cast create people that are as real and individual as the settings through which they wander.

 

Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016)

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Beyond

Captain James T. Kirk: Chris Pine
Commander Spock: Zachary Quinto
Dr. McCoy: Karl Urban
Lieutenant Uhura: Zoe Saldana
Montgomery Scott: Simon Pegg
Sulu: John Cho
Chekov: Anton Yelchin
Krall: Idris Elba
Jaylah: Sofia Boutella

Director: Justin Lin
Screenplay: Simon Pegg, Doug Jung
Cinematography: Stephen F. Windon
Production design: Andrew Murdock, Thomas E. Sanders
Music: Michael Giacchino
Costume design: Sanja Milkovic Hays

Writing a screenplay for a Star Trek reboot film must be something of a confining job. You have to provide a worthy adversary for the Enterprise crew, who eat worthy adversaries for lunch, so you need to create a role for an actor who doesn't mind hamming it up, like Eric Bana, Benedict Cumberbatch, or Idris Elba, and keep the role distinct from all the other villains who have threatened the Enterprise. You have to provide the requisite familiar shtick for the characters: Bones and Spock must squabble, but good naturedly; Bones has to say something like "I'm not a doctor, I'm a...." at least once; Scotty has to fuss about the limitations of his engines; Chekov has to have a charming occasion to pronounce his v's like w's, and so on. You also have to provide a few surprises about the characters: Spock and Uhura are a couple! Sulu's gay! You have to have a pretty female newcomer who can wear elaborate alien makeup but still look pretty. You have to set up the plot to accommodate spectacular special effects. So no wonder that each successive reboot movie feels a little overfamiliar, and that there are shortcuts in the narrative that don't bear close inspection. In Star Trek Beyond, for example, we leave Scotty hanging from a cliff by the fingertips of one hand, but not too much later he shows up alive and well with no explanation of how someone with the average musculature of a Simon Pegg hoisted himself over the edge. And no wonder that Star Trek Beyond went through heavy rewriting, with Pegg and Doug Jung taking over the script after a first draft by Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay, and John D. Payne was turned down by the producers. There are some touches of wit in the script, such as the opening sequence in which Kirk faces down a crowd of what appear to be fearsome monsters but turn out to be about the size of schnauzers, and a clever use of an antique boom box -- perhaps a nod to the one carried by the punk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), whom Spock incapacitated with a Vulcan nerve pinch -- as a lethally disorienting weapon against Krall's forces. The box booms out the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," a track that would be several centuries old, and Bones asks Spock, "Is that classical music I'm hearing?" to which Spock replies, "Yes, doctor, I believe it is." The cast does its usual best, with Pine nicely suggesting some of the old Shatnerian swagger as Kirk without resorting to caricature, and Elba, for much of the film unrecognizable under the makeup, giving his villain real menacing weight. But in the end, the reboot itself has lost freshness. It's time to give the shtick a rest and to provide a threat to the crew that isn't so dependent on an actor going over the top. Perhaps it's time to come up with a science fiction plot that relies more on science than on fiction.

Watched on Hulu

Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)

I'm not a Trekkie. I never watched TOS* when it was first on TV, and only got hooked on TNG* when it went into re-runs. I don't speak a word of Klingon. But I can do the "Live long and prosper" hand sign, so I guess I can pass among those who aren't really hardcore. In fact, when I learned that J.J. Abrams, the rebooter of moribund franchises, was going to make his first Star Trek film (2009), I was neither appalled nor intrigued, as a real Trekkie would be. Only one of the movies featuring the cast of TOS was really very good: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), aka "the one with the whales." And even then, it was the script that made William Shatner in rug and corset trying to recapture the old Capt. Kirk swagger even plausible. Fortunately, it will take a few more years before the new cast -- Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin -- need their own reboot. The great charm of Star Trek has always been its ensemble work. No one watching the series either on TV or in movies really cares that much about the story. It's the interplay of characters -- the bromance of Kirk and Spock (heightened to near-homoeroticism in the Pine-Quinto version), the grumpiness of Bones McCoy, the devotion of Scotty to his engines, and so on -- that makes the creaky old sci-fi clichés come to life. Throw in some in-jokes for longtime fans, such as the Tribble in this film, and you've got a surefire hit. The remarkable thing about the cast of the Abrams films is that they so far have transcended the paint-by-numbers quality of the plots and managed to make the CGI effects secondary to the humanity. Benedict Cumberbatch is a far more terrifying Khan than Ricardo Montalban with his rubber pecs ever was. And I admit that I teared up a bit seeing Leonard Nimoy in what turned out to be his farewell cameo. No, this is not a great movie, but there is great shrewdness in its casting.

*If you're reading this entry, I assume you don't have to be told that this is Trekkiese for Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. But if you're reading this footnote, I guess you do.