Tag Archives: John Cho

Columbus (2017)

17 Thursday Jan 2019

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D: Kogonada / 104m

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin, Parker Posey

When his father, a renowned architecture scholar, becomes ill and lapses into a coma prior to a speaking engagement in Columbus, Indiana, his estranged son, Jin (Cho), travels there to be at his side. While Jin waits for his father to recover, he meets a young local woman, Casey (Richardson), who works in a library near the hospital. Her passion for architecture is at odds with his own disinterest, but they strike up a friendship as she shows him her favourite buildings in the city. Jin reveals the differences that have kept him and his father apart for so long, while Casey admits that her mother, Maria (Forbes), is a recovering drug addict. This is also the reason why she’s passed on opportunities to leave Columbus and make a career for herself as an architect. While wrestling with his own feelings about his father, Jin challenges Casey to make something of her life, but his advice isn’t well received. It’s not until Casey discovers that her mother isn’t always at the two jobs she has, and that she may have relapsed, that Jin’s advice starts to sink in…

Every once in a while a movie comes along that is so singularly expressive that it makes you wonder why no one else has made a movie like it before. Such a movie is Columbus, the creation of video essayist Kogonada. It’s a hugely impressive feature debut, a visual tone poem that combines stark, formal screen compositions with nuanced emotional content, and which allows both these aspects to complement each other naturally and without any sense that either have been forced together unnecessarily. There are many unique buildings in Columbus, Indiana, and Kogonada incorporates them as supporting characters, rigid backdrops that provide insights into the hopes and dreams that Casey feels she has to suppress, and which Jin has abandoned. Through the use of careful framing, and recurring visual motifs – many shots are of doorways and what’s beyond them – the movie paints a wonderfully distinctive, and unexpectedly immersive portrait of a friendship that’s increasingly defined by the characters’ relationship to the spaces around them at any given time. Whether it’s Casey dancing wildly outside the formidable façade of the school she attended, or Casey and Jin having an argument within the confines of a covered bridge, the choice of location always enhances the emotional requirements of the scene in question.

While the relationship between Jin and Casey remains the kind of friendship that only exists in the movies, the script doesn’t allow itself to fall into any of the usual traps where romance rears its inappropriate head, or misunderstandings cause a rift that’s resolved too easily in the final scene. Jin’s sobering sense of duty (Korean tradition has him waiting at his father’s bedside to ensure he doesn’t die alone), is at odds with his need to live his own life free from the parental and cultural constraints he’s broken away from. Meanwhile, Casey’s own sense of duty (how will her mother cope if she leaves?), keeps her from achieving her own escape. Their friendship allows both to learn some valuable lessons from each other, but this is done in such an organic, subtle way that it feels fresh, and the outcome less than predictable. Cho and Richardson are both excellent, each giving beautifully measured performances that bring their characters to life in ways that are entirely truthful and recognisable for their aspirations and vulnerabilities. The movie adopts a slow, stately pace that suits the material, and there are narrative gaps that add a sense of mystery and which keep the viewer “on their toes”. But all in all, this is a beautiful, fascinating, lustrous gem of a movie and one of the finest in recent years.

Rating: 9/10 – with its visually stunning look courtesy of writer/director/editor Kogonada and DoP Elisha Christian, and a poignant central relationship that’s expertly played by its leads, Columbus is an unexpectedly moving treatise on loss and love that rewards the viewer at every turn; not for everyone, but for those willing to give themselves over to it, this is an exceptional movie that mesmerises and fascinates, and which does so long after it’s over.

Searching (2018)

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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D: Aneesh Chaganty / 102m

Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Joseph Lee, Sara Sohn, Briana McLean, Erica Jenkins, Steven Michael Eich

It’s been two years since David Kim (Cho) and his daughter, Margot (La), lost their wife and mother respectively to cancer. In those two years the pair have grown distant, with both waiting for the other to talk about what happened. Instead, David focuses on Margot’s education (she has a gift for playing the piano), while Margot tries to focus on being a normal teenager. One night, they speak via FaceTime while Margot is at a study group, and everything seems fine. Later that night, she tries to call David but he’s asleep and misses her calls. The next day, she doesn’t respond when he tries to call her back. Expecting her to be at a piano lesson after school David calls the tutor, only to learn that Margot cancelled her lessons six months before. When he finds himself unable to track her down, David calls the police and reports Margot as missing. The detective assigned to the case, Rosemary Vick (Messing) asks David to look into Margot’s background, her school life and her friends. But when he does he discovers things about his daughter that don’t make any sense, and which only make her disappearance that much more inexplicable…

Cleverly constructed from the start until the end, Searching is a mystery thriller that utilises modern technology in such a way that the movie feels – for much of its running time at least – like it hasn’t been filmed at all. Using a variety of virtual photography tricks and sleights of hand, we see the action unfold within the foreground of computer screens and other electronic devices, and against a backdrop of computer apps. Sometimes there’s so much going on on the screen that it’s hard to take it all in, but it’s all so cleverly assembled and handled that, much like reading subtitles, the eye and the brain soon compensate and pick out what’s relevant and what isn’t. David is our guide, and in Cho’s more than capable hands, we follow him willingly as he begins to piece together the various clues that go to make up the details of Margot’s disappearance. Whether he’s using FaceTime or Google or accessing photos, or trawling through Margot’s vlogs on YouCast, David takes us on a journey that is fascinating and akin to exploring a foreign country.

With the movie’s visuals broadening to include news footage (amongst others), and remaining compelling until the end, it’s a shame then that it’s all in service to a screenplay by director Chaganty and Sev Ohanian that can’t sustain the initial promise of its first hour. In amongst all the internet pages and online research that David carries out, and amid all the relevant information that Margot leaves behind (unknowingly), the script throws in a number of massively signposted clues that will have keen-eyed and -eared viewers shaking their heads in disbelief at how obvious the solution is. Up until the hour mark, Chaganty has kept the mystery elements front and centre and each twist and turn of the narrative has been smartly handled, but the need to start revealing things and head into the finishing stretch sees the movie lose momentum and its carefully assembled credibility. By the end, and a confession that sounds like the very definition of contrived, the movie has lost its way completely, and not even Cho, who is on superb form, can bring it back from the abyss it seems so set on throwing itself into. Make no mistake, this is a tense, visually arresting movie, but also one that doesn’t have a narrative that remains consistent enough throughout to match the quality of its presentation.

Rating: 7/10 – compelling and persuasive (for that first hour), Searching is a visual breath of fresh air, effectively handled and confidently displayed; a shame then that more attention couldn’t have been applied to the script, which lets down the visuals and which also hinders a terrific performance from Cho.

Gemini (2017)

31 Friday Aug 2018

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D: Aaron Katz / 93m

Cast: Lola Kirke, Zoë Kravitz, Greta Lee, John Cho, Michelle Forbes, Nelson Franklin, Reeve Carney, Jessica Parker Kennedy, James Ransone, Ricki Lake

Jill LeBeau (Kirke) is the personal assistant to famous actress Heather Anderson (Kravitz). Heather has been in talks to make a new movie but has decided to take a break for a while instead. She persuades Jill to tell one of the producers, Greg (Franklin), the news, and he’s predictably angry. Ensuing attention from a self-proclaimed superfan (Kennedy), as well as a paparazzi, Stan (Ransone), adds further stress to Heather’s decision. When Heather asks Jill to borrow her gun because she doesn’t feel “safe”, Jill reluctantly agrees. At Heather’s home one morning, Jill tries to take back the gun but it goes off accidentally. No one is hurt, but Heather keeps the weapon. However, when Jill comes back later, she finds Heather dead from multiple gun shot wounds. It isn’t long before the police, led by Detective Ahn (Cho), deduce that Jill was the last person to see Heather alive, and that only her fingerprints are on the gun. With the residue from the misfire on her hand as well, Jill quickly becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of the police, but she determines to find out for herself just who did kill Heather…

For much of the first twenty minutes of Gemini, the nature of the relationship between Jill and Heather is somewhat blurred, and perhaps deliberately so. There’s a hint that they might be lovers, something that’s given a degree of credence when one of Heather’s ex-boyfriends, Devin (Carney), calls to say that he knows “what’s going on” (and to make a convenient death threat). Later, when the superfan asks if they’re an item, Heather’s response is indignant, but she doesn’t deny it outright. Nor does she when Stan the paparazzi asks the same question. But on another night, they share a bed at Heather’s home, and Heather whispers “I love you” while Jill sleeps. With the possibility of a deeper emotional relationship existing between the pair, writer-director Katz establishes a more profound meaning for Jill’s solo investigation of Heather’s murder: she’s not just keeping herself out of jail, she wants to find the killer of someone she truly cared about. This informs much of Jill’s quest to keep one step ahead of the police, while also providing the narrative with a depth that is both unexpected and entirely welcome.

What also helps is the modern day film noir vibe that the movie gives off, with Jill in the role of erstwhile private investigator, and the list of suspects such that any one of them could have done it. Katz manipulates the various clues and potential culprits with a great deal of skill, even including a scene where Jill speaks to Greg and he tells her who he thinks is the killer – if he were writing the whole thing as a script. Clever touches such as this, along with a number of visual flourishes, keep the movie from feeling stale or inevitable, and it’s further embellished by a terrific performance from Kirke, giving Jill a resourcefulness that keeps her focused and willing to take calculated risks, whether it’s sneaking into Devin’s hotel room or evading the police on a motorcycle. It’s a confident portrayal of a confident woman, and Kirke proves throughout that Katz was right to choose her for the role. In support, Kravitz is sweet natured yet nervy as Heather, while Cho is charmingly off kilter as the detective who would usually believe in the heroine’s innocence but instead is convinced she’s guilty. It’s another quirky, atypical choice from Katz, and like much else, makes Gemini more than just a pleasant diversion.

Rating: 8/10 – an conventional murder mystery given an unconventional spin, Gemini is an unexpected delight, thanks to Kirke’s self-assured performance, Katz’s witty screenplay, and a tremendously atmospheric mise en scene; only occasionally betraying its modest budget, it’s a movie that provides far more than meets the eye for the viewer willing to delve deeper into its seemingly straightforward plotting.

Literally, Right Before Aaron (2017)

22 Sunday Oct 2017

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D: Ryan Eggold / 102m

Cast: Justin Long, Cobie Smulders, Ryan Hansen, John Cho, Kristen Schaal, Dana Delany, Peter Gallagher, Lea Thompson, Luis Guzmán, Malcolm Barrett, Briga Heelan, Charlyne Yi, Charlotte McKinney, Parvesh Cheena, Dov Tiefenbach, Manu Intiraymi

How you feel about Adam (Long), Literally, Right Before Aaron‘s main protagonist, may depend largely on your reaction to something that his ex-girlfriend, Allison (Smulders) says as he replays their first meeting: “I can’t tell if you’re charming, or just being an asshole”. It’s a salient point, as Adam is, by and large, an asshole, another of cinema’s eternal losers, the guy who not only loses the girl but also loses a big part of his identity as well. He behaves inappropriately at times, is ignored and/or put upon by others, and has at least one friend (Cho) who isn’t afraid to point out the obvious: that he’s an asshole and one of [life’s] eternal losers. He’s a hard character to like, and to spend time with, and despite several attempts by writer/director Eggold, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for him. He’s the author of his own downfall on too many occasions, and seems intent on making the same mistakes over and over.

In terms of the movie, Adam’s first big mistake is to accept Allison’s invitation to her upcoming wedding to Aaron (Hansen), literally the next guy she dated after breaking up with Adam. Adam is naturally conflicted. It’s been eighteen months since he and Allison split up, and though he has a new girlfriend, Julie (Heelan), he still loves Allison and still wants to be with her. He accepts the invitation in the hope of getting her to change her mind and start over, but his own indecision and social awkwardness keeps him from making any kind of impassioned plea that might do the job. He gets to spend a little time with Allison, reminisces about all the fun times they had, and then does nothing. Heartsick, and doomed to witness Allison and Aaron get married, Adam does allow his friend to provide him with a plus one, dollmaker Talula (Schaal), but the wedding goes ahead as planned. It’s not until the reception and a combination of too much alcohol and being desperate that Adam decides to do anything at all…

Eggold is returning to the characters and milieu he first created through an award-winning short movie of the same name that was released in 2011. Like so many features expanded from an original short movie, Literally, Right Before Aaron suffers from a surfeit of extraneous scenes – Adam runs into an old college friend (Barrett) at the library and feigns knowledge of Allison and what’s she’s up to, and then does the same with his mother (Thompson), literally two scenes later – and loses some of the impact that a shorter running time requires. And instead of exploring the characters and their motivations in greater detail, Eggold the writer paints them in broad strokes and has them repeat the same actions or mistakes over and over. One question is likely to be at the forefront of viewers’ minds right from the start – why did Adam and Allison split up after eight years together? – but when it is finally addressed, the answer is conveniently interrupted. It’s important to know because it’s Allison’s wish that they remain friends; but why if they broke up, and as it appears from the opening scene, they haven’t seen each other since they split up.

Adam’s misplaced sense of relationship masochism sends him to the wedding, and while that’s understandable as an urge to try and restore things to happier times – Adam is often asked if he’s happy, and mostly because he doesn’t look it – once there Eggold has no choice but to make things even more difficult for Adam, and whether it’s a credulous hotel clerk (Cheena), or the all-encompassing charisma of Aaron himself, Adam is left trailing in everyone’s wake, invisible or simply not worth acknowledging. And strangely, Adam is made an accomplice to all this, his weak-natured sense of self respect leading him into awkward situations and a degree of emotional distress that he almost encourages by remaining silent. It’s not until the reception and several drinks that Adam takes courage from a piece of graffiti – Carpe diem – and finds the wherewithal to confront Allison over the cause of their break up. And though by then you might still be interested in hearing her answer, it really doesn’t matter because you’ll have decided, rightly, that it was because Adam was just “being an asshole”.

As the beleaguered Adam, Long copes well with the demands of a character who is inherently obtuse, and his innate likeability as an actor goes some way to offsetting Adam’s emotional stubbornness, but he’s unable to overcome Eggold’s insistence that the character remain churlish and insipid (a difficult combination to pull off at the best of times) right up until almost the very end. With Adam being the primary focus – he’s in nearly every scene – Allison is reduced to a secondary character, the deus ex machina that drives the story forward but Eggold doesn’t make her involvement or her situation as vital, even though her motivations should be more integral to the story. Smulders has only one scene in which to shine, but thanks to Eggold’s limitations as a writer, even then she’s given far too little to work with. The rest of the cast provide solid if unremarkable performances, with the likes of Delany, Thompson, and Guzmán making what amount to cameo appearances.

As well as wearing a director and a screenwriter’s hat, Eggold also co-produces and edits the movie, and contributes to the score alongside David Goldman, and though it’s admirable that he’s taken on all these roles, it’s tempting to feel that maybe he’s taken on more than he can adequately deal with. As a writer, he’s not as focused or as insightful as he could have been, though as a director he’s on much firmer ground, guiding the story in a simple, immediate fashion that doesn’t rely on directorial frills or fancy camera work to show off what he’s capable of. It’s an approach that suits the material as well. As an editor though, Eggold doesn’t always know when it’s right to cut from one character to another in a scene, and there are times – mostly during the reception sequences – where it’s hard to tell if an issue is due to the editing or the continuity. For the most part the movie is appealing to watch thanks to Seamus Tierney’s cinematography, and San Francisco is exploited to good effect, but overall this is a movie that, like it’s central character, is “a little rough around the edges”, but not enough to make it more successful.

Rating: 5/10 – a comedy that’s only sporadically funny, and a drama that’s only sporadically dramatic, Literally, Right Before Aaron is a mixed bag thanks to its having a main character who’s hard to engage with; there are flashes of what could have been, and some of the minor characters make it more enjoyable, but Eggold’s feature debut also consists of too much padding to be truly effective.