The Wedding Banquet, Lies We Tell and Forgive Us All are in cinemas.
The trailer for The Wedding Banquet, Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s beloved 1993 romantic comedy, foregrounds the biggest name in the film, Saturday Night Live comedian Bowen Yang, and plays up the wackier moments in order to make it seem like an uproarious queer comic romp.
Regular cinema goers may not be surprised to learn that it is not reflective of the actual film, but it is rare to have the tone so misrepresented as this one is. There are jokes, to be sure, and there are some cringe-comedy moments and humorous situational misunderstandings, but the film is actually pretty grounded in authentic human relationships and sincere emotions. It’s actually pretty moving.
Yang plays Chris, a gay man in Seattle, with problems making commitments. He lives in a (nicely appointed to be fair) garage belonging to his lesbian friends, Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), he has dropped out of grad school and makes a living conducting birdwatching tours. His partner Min (Han Gi-chan) is a trust fund kid making his way as an artist but his grandparents back in Korea are unaware of his art or his sexuality.
Min’s student visa is expiring and the family want him to return home to take up an executive role in the company. Meanwhile, Lee and Angela are trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant via IVF.
In order to stay in the United States, Min hatches the matchless plan of a marriage of convenience with Angela. In exchange, he will pay for the next round of fertility treatment for Lee. There are only two (possibly even more) problems with this scheme – Chris’s fear of commitment and the possibility that Grandma Ja-Young (Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung) might arrive unexpectedly and discover the ruse.
Which is, of course, what happens.
As you might expect with a film that is anchored by the star of Killers of the Flower Moon, the majority of it is underplayed which allows the farce – when it appears – to burst into life and then retreat back to normality. There’s a very funny meta moment in the “de-gaying of the house” montage, in hurried anticipation of Grandma’s arrival, where Gladstone removes all the LGBTQ-themed DVDs from the shelf including a film that she appeared in.
Co-written by Ahn with James Schamus (the co-screenwriter of the original film), this Wedding Banquet brings the story into squarely into the present day and does a fine job of representing all the diversity – of thought, of attitude, of politics – that exists in the Queer community. Watching it today feels like a political gesture in its own right as almost everyone in this film is at risk of a one-way trip to an El Salvadoran prison in the current environment.
I reviewed the Irish gothic drama, Lies We Tell, for last year’s British and Irish Film Festival and, I’m sorry to say, I was not impressed:
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I was less enamoured by this gothic horror – inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas – in which a rich orphan is terrorised by the people who have been assigned to her guardianship.
It’s partly the stilted and self-conscious Victorian-style dialogue and partly the performance inconsistencies from scene to scene, but I never felt like this one let me in – or particularly wanted to.
According to the Otago Daily Times, Queenstown couple Jordana Stott and Lance Giles sold their Australian ready-made food company for $125m in order to realise their dream of making a feature film. Shooting last year in the Queenstown area, with a crew full of top kiwi and Australian talent, the result is Forgive Us All, a slick but derivative horror-thriller set in a world where a virus has turned most of humanity into flesh-eating zombies.
Lily Sullivan plays a grieving mother, living on a remote station in the mountains with her ex-special forces father-in-law (Richard Roxburgh). While most of the remaining population has been shipped off into camps by the government, these two are “surviving” (as Roxburgh’s character puts it) when a mysterious, wounded, stranger turns up carrying a vial of antidote to the virus.
Coincidentally, on the same day I saw Forgive Us All, we watched the new 4K restored version of Tarsem’s masterpiece, The Fall. Like Stott’s film, it too was self-funded by the filmmaker. Tarsem was a top commercials director in the 90s and early 200s and ploughed every spare dollar he had – as well as borrowing the crews and locations for his big budget TV ads – into realising his singular vision.
This might not be a fair comparison, but it’s the one that fate delivered to me, and I can’t help wondering – if you were going to spend ten million dollars of your own money on a film, why you would make the same film that every other bugger is making? There is very little that’s original in either conception or execution.
For a while, I thought it was going to be one of those stealth Christian films – the title, the opening voiceover suggesting that the virus survivors thought that “God had left us”, the graffiti on the road saying, “Hell is real”. But, if that was the motive, it thankfully doesn’t follow through in any literal way.
But then there is the relationship between a virus, an overreaching state response – the villain of the film is a psychopathic government tracker played by Aussie Callan Mulvey – and lots of talk about freedom, property and trespass from Roxburgh’s character. Add to that, the fact that there’s a script consultant credit for screenwriter Dane Giraud, who happens to also be a board member of the Free Speech Union (an organisation that has argued that Nazis should be allowed to speak in publicly-owned venues and advocated for the right of a Holocaust-denier to visit New Zealand on a money-making tour) and the libertarian conspiracy theory door is ajar.
Of course, I’m drawing a very long bow, but when the film itself is so uninteresting, this is where my mind wanders. The perils of overthinking.
