Review of Columbus (2017) by V H — 16 Sep 2017

Casey is a young woman living in Columbus, Indiana (as opposed to Columbus, Ohio, as I had assumed throughout the movie, since it's the only Columbus I ever heard of). Columbus, Indiana is apparently noteworthy for its modern architecture, which is also news to me.

I was never quite clear if Casey recently graduated from college or if she never finished college, but in either case, she's decided to settle down in her hometown of Columbus because she likes the architecture and more importantly, she's afraid that if she leaves, her recovering addict mother will revert to being a plain old adjectiveless addict. Casey works in a library with Macaulay Culkin's younger brother, but virtually everyone she encounters expresses the unsolicited opinion that she should leave town and do something more with her life.

Jin is a 40-ish Korean man who's temporarily residing in Columbus because his estranged father, who was in town to deliver a lecture, collapsed and fell into a coma. I'm not sure if Jin's father is an architect himself or just an expert on architecture, but he's definitely some sort of renowned guy in the field. His longtime assistant, Parker Posey, is happy to see Jin for the first time since he was a teenager, but is annoyed that he's not spending more of his time at his comatose father's bedside.

Instead, he's gallivanting around town with Casey, who he's become fast friends with after having bummed a cigarette off of her and learning that she's an architecture geek who'd been planning to go to his father's lecture. Jin smokes, Casey smokes, Macaulay Culkin's younger brother smokes - there are almost as many cigarettes in this film as there are modern buildings. Casey drives Jin around showing him her favorite buildings and the two gaze at them endlessly while she prattles on about how she feels about them. Jin claims not to even like architecture but he does his share of yapping about it as well.

"Columbus" gets off to an incredibly slow start, but it got such good reviews I was thinking, OK, I'll figure out who all these characters are and start caring about them any minute now. But it took a really long time before any of this started coming together and I think it's fair to say that it remained very slow throughout.

This is a nice looking movie with all sorts of lingering shots of the same cool bridge and modern buildings over and over. I like architecture, despite not knowing anything about it, and I'm even OK with slow movies, but there's just something missing here. Besides a plot, I mean. Fortunately, I'm OK with movies without plots also.

For one thing, I didn't buy the Casey/Jin friendship. Not only is Jin way older than Casey, he isn't even all that nice or even terribly interesting as far as we can tell, so why is Casey so eager to hang with him? And other than not having anything better to do while waiting for his father to die, why does Jin enjoy hanging out with Casey, especially when he claims not to care about architecture? Literally all they do is drive around looking at buildings and smoking cigarettes. They never go to dinner. They never watch a movie. Just about the only thing they seem to have in common is a nicotine addiction.

There are several areas of the story I thought were really unclear. It's possible that I missed something (or several somethings), but it's not like I wasn't paying attention. It's also possible that bad editing is to blame. This is the sort of movie that makes me really miss the recently retired IMDB message boards, which despite their horrible nested format and scads of inane clutter, usually had at least one person asking whatever questions I had about any given movie.

I really expected to love "Columbus". After all, everyone else seemed to.

Just didn't happen.