Now Streaming: Kogonada's Wondrous Style in PACHINKO and THE ACOLYTE
Opening this week, A Big Beautiful Journey, starring Colin Ferrell and Margot Robbie, sounds like it falls outside our usual genre-film coverage. After all, it's described in marketing materials as a fantasy romantic drama!
The difference is the director: Kogonada, who has carved out a distinctive career that is highly attuned to genre concerns. (By the way, his latest is definitely not a cookie-cutter Hollywood romantic fantasy. Look for our review later.) Now let's take a closer look at his past work.
Born in South Korea, his family moved to the Midwestern U.S. when he was a child. After posting his first video essay on television's Breaking Bad in 2012, the following year he starting making video essays for the British Film Institute, Sight & Sound, and the Criterion Collection, three of which are now streaming, along with a making-of and a promotional video. To get a further taste, visit his official site, which currently houses 15 of his video essays. They're all excellent, and provide an introduction to his perceptive insights on influential filmmakers.
Given the vagaries of streaming services, it is indeed unfortunate that neither of the director's first two feature films are currently available to stream.
Columbus (2017)
The film is not currently streaming. It is available on various Video On Demand platforms, and also on physical media.
Born in Korea, the character played by John Cho visits Columbus, Indiana, where his architect father lies in a coma. There he meets Haley Lu Richardson, a young woman who feels tied to to the town by her mother, a recovering addict. The supporting cast includes Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, and Kieran Culkin.
This is a very quiet drama that, through the magic of filmmaking and the supple hand of writer/director Kogonada, becomes transfixing. Something about the rhythm of the film aligns with the soul, making the film utterly compelling to watch.
After Yang (2021)
The film is not currently streaming. It is available on various Video On Demand platforms, and also on physical media.
Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith and Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja star in the sci-fi story of how a family copes when a humanoid A.I. assistant breaks down.
Our own Mel Valentin saw the film at Sundance in January 2022. In his review, he did not hold back:
"To say there aren't enough superlatives in the English language to describe After Yang, writer-director Kogonada's (Columbus) minimalist, lo-fi sci-fi fable that explores the myriad connections between identity, memory, and technology, might sound like hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true.
"After Yang deserves all the superlatives and any of the accolades it ultimately receives. (It's already received the 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize from the Sundance Film Festival.) Not only does After Yang confirm Kogonada as one of the best filmmakers working today but also elevates him to the front rank of world-class filmmakers (again, more hyperbole, and so forth)."
Pachinko, S1, E1-3, 7 (2022)
Both seasons are now streaming on Apple TV+.
Created Soo Hugh, based on Min Jin Lee's novel, first published in 2017, the series deftly explores four generations of a Korean family, first living under harsh Japanese rule in their homeland, then following them as they moved to Osaka, Japan, and make a new life in the Koreatown there.
I was quickly enamored by the series, which divided the episodes under the direction of Kogonada and the similarly-talented Justin Chon. "Bold, messy, sprawling, intimate, and infuriating," I declared in my review. I enjoyed how the first three episodes swayed back and forth in time. Episode 7 "is almost a stand-alone film, yet informs the rest of the series.
"Featuring strong, supple performances and a thoughtful, propulsive narrative, Pachinko resembles a magnificent melodramatic epic, utilizing heightened historical events to show how they affected the people who experienced, survived, and learned from them. Vividly told, the lessons are often harsh, which does not in any way lessen their value. If anything, survival teaches its own lessons. And deep, engrained prejudice respects no national boundaries."
(P.S. I quite liked Season 2 as well.)
The Acolyte, S1, E3 and E7 (2024)
The series is now streaming on Disney Plus.
Created by Leslye Headland, the series was set at the end of the High Republic, or about 100 years before the start of the Skywalker Saga that began with Star Wars in 1977. Amandla Stenberg starred, with her notable co-stars including Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game) as a Jedi Master leading an investigation into a series of crimes.
Premiering in June 2024, the series was uneven, to say the least. It came under unwarranted fire from a segment of die-hard Star Wars fanatics, upset at its focus on the female perspective, and fell far short of Disney's expectations for viewership, leading to its cancellation in August 2024.
Kogonada directed Episode 3 and 7, which are both framed as flashbacks to tragic events, around which everything else in the narrative revolved, told from the differing perspectives of a coven of witches (Episode 3) and the Jedi (Episode 7). Those two episodes stand out for the clarity of the storytelling, as Kogonada put his own stamp on the visual schemes that had been developed by Leslye Headland and a large creative team.
Of course, the Internet viewed things differently: in searching for an official video from those two episodes, I instead came across a lot of angry fan videos that declared the episodes had somehow "broken" the sacred Star Wars. (*sigh*)
Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.
