The Wedding Banquet review: Charming cast outshine the flimsy material in fluffy remake of Ang Lee's indie classic
The Wedding Banquet
Director
:
Andrew Ahn
Cert
:
15A
Starring
:
Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan, Joan Chen, Youn Yuh-jung
Running Time
:
1 hr 44 mins
Times have changed since Ang Lee's original Wedding Planner, an understated indie classic, introduced a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant, his long-term male partner and a fancy sham
wedding
designed to fool visiting parents. James Schamus, who cowrote that film, from 1993, also shares writing credits with the director Andrew Ahn on this muddled remake.
Relocating the action from San Francisco to cuddly, contemporary Seattle, The Wedding Banquet ties itself in knots to facilitate a phoney marriage in an LGBTQ-accepting environment.
Lee (
Lily Gladstone
) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) are committed, loving lesbians undergoing a financially ruinous second round of IVF. Angela's college chum Chris (Bowen Yang) and his wealthy boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-chan), live in their garage.
Doors are mere metaphors in this arrangement, which allows the curiously sexless couples to wander in and out of each other's dwellings and private moments. With similar blunt force, characters 'speak their truth' in lieu of plotting. These farcical rhythms lend themselves to pitifully few jokes.
READ MORE
Min, whose US visa is about to expire, is summoned back to Korea by his tycoon grandparents. He proposes to Chris, his boyfriend of five years, who declines, citing commitment phobia. He subsequently proposes to Angela with a green card in mind and a promise to fund Lee's IVF. Before you can say 'Huh?', Min's grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, the Oscar-winning star of
Minari
) visits the quartet.
Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet culminated in a beautiful moment when the protagonist's father acknowledged his son-in-law with a traditional bridal envelope. There is no room for such nuance in the fluffy redo. Grandma immediately sees through the flimflam and orchestrates a lavish, traditional Korean wedding for the benefit of her homophobic husband. That character might have allowed for some drama and subterfuge, but he remains resolutely off-screen.
Technically, Wedding Banquet 2025 is a dog's dinner. The camera shots and angles are eccentric; a simple two-shot conversation scene completely obscures one of the participants. A distracting amount of fractionally out-of-sync dialogue adds to the bumpy ride.
It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela's loudly gay-positive mother.
In cinemas from Friday, May 9th
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle: A brash novel about early 2000s New York that finds treasure in the trash
Aftertaste Author : Daria Lavelle ISBN-13 : 978-1526683946 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Ukrainian-American Daria Lavelle's debut novel is a tale of love, loss and horror set against the freakish backdrop of Manhattan's dining scene. Kostya is a chef who can taste the food dead people desire, which he re-creates for ghosts to share with the ones that mourn them. As with many underworld ventures, things go amiss. Already, Aftertaste has summoned quite a stir, with a movie in the works. There's Stephen King in this novel's ancestry, in style as well as scares. Like King, Lavelle is unabashed that her prose can be clumsy and cliched – 'orgasmic eating experience', 'the perfect, crispy crackle of golden fried chicken skin'. What matters is momentum. Lavelle's writing pounds with bada-boom dialogue and the kind of adrenaline found in an over-heated kitchen during service. In the way she uses brands and celebrities as descriptors, Lavelle evokes Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. About one Russian kingpin, she writes: 'While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle … his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him in an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking with too much cologne.' Just as Ellis never escapes the 1980s, Lavelle's New York, although purportedly present-day, is mired in the early aughts. Macho chefs and hidden speakeasies abound; the East Village is still cool, and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential very much alive. There's a banquet featuring ingredients that once upon a time might have induced gasps – the endangered songbird ortolan, the potentially lethal fugu fish. Kostya's love interest Maura is by-the-book retro, a manic-pixie dream girl with purple hair. READ MORE Is Afterlife sometimes sloppy and occasionally bad? Perhaps, but to read it is a rush. Besides, one should be suspicious of someone who disdains all junk, be it a McDonald's French fry or Real Housewives marathon. As an elegy to a city where garbage and greatness go hand in hand, it's only appropriate to find a little trash in Aftertaste's soul.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Edmund White: ‘He never broke faith with the nobility of a literary life'
One of the reasons it is difficult to write about Edmund White is that he himself frequently speculated about what people would say about him after he died. Would he be a Genet, a Bowen, an Isherwood? Most artists nurse this vain anxiety somewhere, but generally they try and hide it. It was typical of Edmund to trumpet a vice: it was of a piece with the sometimes-alarming honesty and taste for shamelessness with which he approached his work (and sometimes wounded those who found themselves revealed or distorted in its pages). Entertaining conjectures about his posthumous legacy sprang, paradoxically, from Edmund's ferocious attachment to life, a result of his relentless, forever-unsatisfied curiosity. He could not abide the thought that there was this one piece of literary news he would never receive. Survival was, of course, a fundamental principle in Edmund's life. One of the very few of his generation of gay men in New York to survive Aids, he found himself in the role of witness, one of a handful of voices able to recount the rules, habits and customs of a world that had had only a brief flicker of existence before it was extinguished. READ MORE Being a surviving witness was a job thrust upon Edmund by accident, and he rose to it magnificently. But in any circumstances, he would have been a chronicler of lost ways of life. He had a passion for intergenerational transmission of many kinds, and took great pleasure in details and ideas, both obsolete and useful, passing between one generation and another. I first met him in the late 1990s. Edmund had just moved to Princeton to teach creative writing; I had come there from Ireland to study comparative literature. I already knew his fiction well – so well that meeting him at a party in Princeton felt almost like an encounter with a part of myself. A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty treated shameful, private longings as noble, universal feelings. They dealt with homosexuality not as a life sentence, but as a predicament that was exciting and filled with possibility. All the gay men in our small, fearful circle in Dublin had passed those novels back and forth. More than anything any of us read or heard or said to each other, those books gave us a vocabulary of feeling, furnished an emotional grammar for our inner lives. I was in Princeton to do a PhD, but I was also working on what would become my first novel. Edmund invited me to dinner in the house he and Michael were renting and suggested I bring some of my manuscript. I thought he was asking me to leave the pages with him, but after dinner, he had me read it aloud while he and Michael sat and listened, and Edmund read from the notebooks that would become his novel The Married Man . Later, it was partly thanks to Edmund's help that my novel found a publisher. Over the years that followed, we dined together regularly, sometimes with his friends in Princeton or with Michael at home in New York. As a student of French literature, I was an especially useful guest on the many occasions Edmund was hosting a visitor from France. He loved speaking French. It energised him, as though he had been plugged into a different power source. As he read French literature, he greedily stockpiled proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase, which he would then use to decorate his conversation. Edmund had learnt French only when he moved to Paris in his 40s, and mastering it, I think, appealed to his passion for self-reinvention. His news was always new: a new boyfriend, a new book, a new obsession with a hitherto overlooked literary figure from the past. He was a person always in the process of becoming, and his fascination with this process, with how his own plot might thicken, was endless. People often compare him to Henry James, because of his interest in the theme of Americans in Paris, or to Proust because of his meticulous observation of the gay underworld and its codes. He and I talked about the characters in Proust as though they were friends we had in common. But in my view, the writer whose sensibility was the most formative for Edmund was Balzac. Like the French novelists, Edmund had a horror of emptiness (the title The Beautiful Room is Empty , taken from Kafka, registered, I always thought, one of his fundamental fears). Humour, as for Balzac, was always immediately available to Edmund, no matter the circumstance. When recounting tales of his lovers, friends or literary activities, he spoke as though we were living in 19th-century Paris. His world was populated with faded 'famous beauties', dastardly but irresistible schemers, conniving dowagers, young men from the provinces with literary ambitions being corrupted by the city, respectable ladies with unspeakable sexual secrets. In Edmund's conception, the social world had a limited repertoire of fixed roles, but one could get to play many of them in one's lifetime. He was capable of translating everything he did himself into these slightly cartoonish Balzacian categories. It gave him a distance and colour that he needed, and it imbued his life with both irony and dignity. This Balzacian world he pretended we all lived in was one of the tools in Edmund's kit of survival smarts. He knew very well that the idea of a literary society where 'everyone' might know your book was a fiction, but he also understood the necessity of acting as though it existed. He saw many things collapse around him over the course of his life, including the old New York publishing world he had made his own career in. But as a survivor himself he expected survival as well as decline. He never broke faith with the truth and resilience of literature, with the nobility of a literary life, and with the solemn, enduring reality of writing as a vocation. These things too, as much as anything else, he made sure to pass on. Barry McCrea is author of The First Verse (2005) ; In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (2011) ; and Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-Century Ireland and Europe (2015)
Irish Times
14 hours ago
- Irish Times
You might think it's Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV
Sometime in April a new fantasy dropped: a walk-in wardrobe swish enough for Jon Hamm to want to break into it. Hamm's role as Andrew 'Coop' Cooper, a sacked hedge-fund manager turned neighbourhood burglar, in Your Friends & Neighbors has been a rare source of unalloyed television pleasure this year, with each Friday episode notification from Apple TV+ becoming the starting pistol for the weekend. Still, forget what I said about wardrobes. This dark comedy with a dash of Dynasty might be set in a fictional 'exclusive hamlet' in New York state, but no one in their right mind would actually want to be one of the neighbours in Your Friends & Neighbors. They are, as Coop's conspiratorial voiceover tells us, 'assholes'. It makes for a fun blend of soap, satire and farce, but it's not aspirational, not unless you genuinely fancy being in the market for torn jeans that cost more than monthly rent. READ MORE The now completed, already renewed nine-parter, created by Jonathan Tropper, instead fits into the recent vogue for depicting the ultrawealthy as venal, ludicrous and unhappy, prompting chicken-and-egg questions about which came first, the money or the grasping personality. [ Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm is hilarious in this riotous, satirical romp Opens in new window ] To be clear, I loved it. Rich people have very funny problems sometimes. Perhaps their greatest flaw is their desire to hang around only with other rich people, which in Your Friends & Neighbors means going to parties organised by your ex-wife's new boyfriend. Westmont Village has those eye-popping American proportions going on but is as oppressive as elite enclaves come. Even the 'keeping up with the Joneses' theme-tune refrain is all pressure, no joy. Yes, how nice to have the time to laze about sharing local arrest gossip in a sauna with four other women wearing matching towels, but how claustrophobic, too. And who really wants to be a member of the sort of stultifying country club that won't stick by you when you're charged with murder? But at least Westmont Village isn't a five-star hotel so suffocating it would put you off the entire concept of holidays. In The White Lotus the lifestyles of the rich and tedious have their own hypnotic quality. I certainly felt as if I was being hypnotised into watching the third season's slow depiction of wellness hell. Never mind the gunfire. It was the forced phone-detoxing and poolside man-pests that were the true horror. That third run reaffirmed my long-held belief that there's never been a massage that hasn't been enlivened by some kind of security emergency. By the finale I felt sorry for the Thailand tourism authorities, who got such a raw deal compared to Taormina, in Sicily, the HBO show's second-season star. And that's the essence of this recent fashion for wealth porn. It's not aspirational lives we're watching, it's aspirational scenery. Maybe the more the real world falls apart, the more audiences – and producers – gravitate towards glimpses of picture-postcard unreality. In Netflix's Sirens , for instance, we're presented with an unnervingly pristine shoreline as the camera follows a perky personal assistant skipping up endless flights of beach steps to the Cliff House. This island mansion has a perfectly positioned swimming pool and grounds so enormous you need a buggy to drive around them. I don't recommend Sirens – it's not so much escapist as a series to escape – though it should be noted that it also possesses some enviably spacious walk-in wardrobe action. To access it, however, you must put up with Julianne Moore being creepy for the best part of five episodes. Never work for someone who might suddenly demand you procure a harp. [ Sirens review: An anaemic White Lotus cover that hits the right notes but has no tune of its own Opens in new window ] Speaking of work, it remains gloriously incidental to the only true aspirational show on television: the Sex and the City spin-off And Just Like That... Carrie Bradshaw, the never-knowingly-underwardrobed Manhattanite played by Sarah Jessica Parker , has rats in her back garden, but her back garden is in a Gramercy Park townhouse, where her new apartment is otherwise shaping up delightfully. Because real estate is no bother to Carrie, she has once again moved on from the rent-controlled studio apartment that Elle Decor has dubbed her 'emotional support brownstone'. [ And Just Like That... Season 3 review: Nostalgia served up like a gift box of premium cupcakes Opens in new window ] The women of And Just Like That... occasionally have to contend with woes such as malfunctioning alarms and demanding podcast producers, but they are radically content, in the main, with being rich. They know their money allows them to enjoy everything from eccentric headwear to ballet. They're free. This seems a good time to revisit remarks made in 2022 by Candace Bushnell , the columnist who inspired the original series, about how much she used to be paid. [ Candace Bushnell at the Ambassador: A fun, girly night out for Sex and the City fans Opens in new window ] In the 1990s she received $5,000 a month for writing the People Are Talking About column for Vogue. The New York Observer, home of Sex and the City, 'paid less', but she could afford that because of Vogue. Before these columns she would 'get an assignment for 3,000 words, $2 per word', which she described as 'failing'. Ah. Failure has never sounded so aspirational.
