Present research

If you're wondering why I haven't posted in ten days, well, you're correct! It's the holidays and I've been slammed. Not only am I feeling the pressure of the gifts I still need to arrange and other typical holiday distractions, but I'm also trying to catch up on what now seems like an onslaught of 2018 movies I need to see before my ranking deadline in just over a month.

I'm sure I've had plenty of blog post ideas during that time, but none of them have been fully baked enough to write themselves, as you need posts to do when you are busy and don't have time to devote to research.

But I don't want you looking at George Clooney's handsome mug any longer when you come to my blog. Time for some new content.

And this one relates to both watching movies and buying presents.

I got ahead of the game with presents for my international family this year, in that I transported ten or so presents with me when I flew to America at the end of October. Unfortunately, I couldn't buy all the presents I would ultimately need for my family members, so I planned to supplement with a shipment in late November or early December.

Well, it's now mid-December and well past any realistic deadline for shipping to America. So the supplementing I'm now doing is gifts purchased from online retailers ... though I'm getting behind on that too.

I'm particularly short on gifts for my dad, which is tough because he's very generous with me. All my family are, of course, and I'd probably say that if I were short for anyone else as well. But it's the person for whom you're short on gifts at the moment whose generosity tends to feel particularly profound. You don't want a failure to supply the requisite number of gifts to serve as an unwitting indication of your gratitude for that generosity.

But I don't want being short on gifts to prompt me to get "just anything." "Just anything" is not a reflection of my gratitude either. I still want to put in a decent amount of thought, even now that time is running short.

So, I vetted a film just to see if it was right for him as a gift.

It was a film I had already seen, of course, and by now you've used your intuition to identify that movie as Kogonada's 2017 indie Columbus. I got the idea it would interest my dad because he's always had a love for architecture, and Kogonada's film is all about that. In fact, if he hadn't become a mechanical engineer it's easy to imagine he might have given architecture a spin. He remains an aficionado for a well-designed building, especially those modernist beauties that improbably populate the otherwise little-known town of Columbus, Indiana.

The idea popped into my head with the joy that accompanies the completion of a difficult task or the solution of a tough riddle. "Columbus, of course," I thought.

But I only just gave him another movie for his birthday back in September, which was also based on his interests: Paul Schrader's First Reformed. My dad is also an environmentalist, and has been so for about 15 years now.

That one ended up being a hit -- though he forgot to tell me that until I asked him -- but that didn't mean I wanted to open the floodgates and just start gifting him movies left and right. My dad is not naturally a film buff, and I've never tried to mold him into being one. Two movie gifts in the space of four months might suggest that this is what I'm trying to do.

So Columbus had to be right. It had to contain enough architecture content to make the purchase worth it, and also be astute in the rest of its observations about the world, of which there are many.

So even with everything else I needed to accomplish on Sunday, I rented Columbus for the second time from iTunes (it informed me I had already watched it, helpfully) and devoted parts of my Sunday afternoon and evening to it. It was my #17 movie of 2017, but I needed to be sure.

After 15 minutes I was sure, but I kept watching it out of pure enjoyment, and because it seems silly to waste a $4.99 rental fee, even when you have plenty else going on. Not only does the architecture present itself beautifully and regularly, and not only are there engrossing discussions on design and the philosophy of why a person loves a building, but there's also a really interesting conversation on attention spans. Rory Culkin's character has one of those conversations with Haley Lu Richardson's character that tend to be favored by Richard Linklater, where the character is essentially functioning as a mouthpiece for the director on some little theory of his he's aching to cram in somewhere. In this case, it has to do with a bookish person's tendency to accuse a video game enthusiast of having a short attention span, because the video game enthusiast doesn't like reading for more than a few minutes. But in reality, the video game enthusiast has a plenty long attention span, just not for things that don't interest him. The bookish person's attention span for video games is equally short.

Anyway, I thought that might give my dad a slightly different perspective on his grandson, who is engrossed in Minecraft for hours on end. I don't think my dad's judging my son, but just in case he is, it's a little useful extra bonus content beyond the architecture.

Now, I just hope he doesn't get extra bonus meaning that I'm not intending about the relationship between John Cho's character and his absent dad, who's lying in a coma for most of the movie. That would be the wrong takeaway.

Also, I hope he doesn't happen to read this before Christmas.