Back in 1993, Ang Lee scored his first Academy attention when The Wedding Banquet was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. The marriage of convenience farce reimagined rom-com tropes and landed emotional hits thanks to nuanced direction and generous characterizations.
A generation later, director Andrew Ahn reimagines once again. His sweet film reexamines the same culture clash and romantic comedy tropes, this time with more of an insider’s viewpoint in an allegedly more progressive world.
Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a wealthy Korean man in the US, making art and living with his commitment phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang). The couple stays in the guest house behind the home of their friends Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), long-committed partners living through the heartbreak, hope, and financial burden of IVF.
Min’s student visa is about to expire, and his grandmother (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) has decided Min needs to return to Korea and take his place in the family business.
So, Min decides to marry a sex worker…no, wait. That’s a different movie. No, when Chris refuses Min’s sincere marriage proposal, he proposes something different. He will pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF if Angela will marry him to keep him in the country.
What follows is a dear if too broad comedic fable about found family, acceptance, and forgiveness. There’s no way Ahn—working from a script co-written with Lee’s original writing collaborator, James Schamus—could have foreseen the sinister cloud that hangs over immigrants, IVF patients, gay marriage, indigenous women, the entire LGBTQ+ population, and essentially every human represented by a character in this film.
The Wedding Banquet already feels nostalgic for a time when disapproving grandparents and medical bills were the only things a gay couple had to worry about.
That aside, Gladstone, You-jung, and Ang Lee regular Joan Chen (as Angela’s mother) are true talents. They do what they can to bring depth to their roles.
Yang struggles with the dramatic needs of his character while Tran has trouble with the comedic, but there’s charm in the mess. Ahn conjures a bubbly, romantic confection and maybe that’s needed right now.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The Oscars are coming and we get to spend some time celebrating the worst of the horror movies made by nominees. Have they made great horror? Well, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs) are nominees, so yes. In fact, there are a whole slew of horror films made by this year’s batch of nominees, most of them far too good to qualify for this list.
No, we want the skeletons. And every single year, nominees have them. Here are this year’s contenders.
5. Daniel Kaluuya: Chatroom (2010)
What is the matter with this movie? Writer Edna Walsh, who’d go on to pen the excellent films Disco Pigs and Hunger, adapted her own stage play. Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Dark Water) directed. The cast is exceptional: Daniel Kaluuya, Imogen Poots, Aaron Taylor-Johnson all play Chelsea teens who hang out in a new chatroom.
How did this to so terribly wrong? As five kids get to know each other online, it turns out that one is a predator looking for a very specific weakness and playing the others against each other. Not a terrible premise, and the overall design is surreal enough to avoid individuals at their laptops. Performances are solid as well.
But, ideas come and go, conflicts arise and disappear, characters appear without warning or introduction and vanish, and storylines fail to make any real sense.
4. Amanda Seyfried & Gary Oldman: Red Riding Hood (2011)
A two-fer! Truth be told, there were plenty of two-fer opportunities with Oldman on this list (he also co-starred with fellow nominee Anthony Hopkins in both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Hannibal).
But this is the one, because it lets us talk about another time he co-starred with Amanda Seyfried. Both are nominated for their work together in 2020’s Mank. Neither were nominated for this.
Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke helms this fractured fairy tale, and it looks gorgeous. The story is overly complicated and stupid, but it hits all the important marks: Valerie (Seyfried) is loved by two potentially dangerous boys whose passion might actually kill her. Oh, it’s such an angsty YA dream!
Seyfried is fine. Oldman is a ham, and he’s such a joy when he’s a ham. There’s a fun cameo from Julie Christie as well. But the weak writing and utterly laughable performances by the two suitors (Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez) are enough to sink this one deep.
3. Anthony Hopkins: The Wolfman (2010)
Hopkins has a lot of horror in his closet, much of it bad. The Rite is the least watchable, but this is the one that’s the most fun to lambast. What a ludicrous waste of talent!
Sir Anthony bites through scenery (among other things) as Sir John Talbot, father of Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro). Their background is murky, their property is foggy, their accents are jarringly different.
Director Joe Johnson likes stuff big and hokey. You’ll find that here. The film won an Oscar for its make up, which we cannot get behind. The final battle looks like two rhoided-up Pomeranians duking it out.
Still, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving are good, and even though the great Del Toro sleepwalks through this embarrassment, Hopkins is always a bit of fun when he camps it up in a bad movie.
2. Gary Oldman: The Unborn (2009)
Oh, Gary Oldman, why do you so rarely say no?
He’s just in so, so, so many movies – mathematically speaking, it only makes sense that a lot of them will be terrible. Like this one, a film that feels less like a single cohesive unit and more like a string of individual scenes filmed as examples of cliches and non sequiturs.
Oldman plays a rabbi who works with a Christian minister played by Idris Elba to help an incredibly entitled young woman who looks like a blander version of Megan Fox (Odette Annable) exorcise a Jewish demon who likes twins.
Cam Gigandet, Meagan Good, James Remar and Carla Gugino also co-star for no logical reason. Well, writer/director David S. Goyer is also writer David S. Goyer (Blade trilogy & Nolan’s Batman trilogy). This movie came immediately on the heels of 2008’s The Dark Knight, which explains Oldman as well as some unmet expectations.
1. Youn Yuh-jung: Insect Woman (1972)
Youn Yuh-jung is a treasure. Her fifty years in movies boasts dozens of remarkable performances usually marked by quirky humor that never feels gimmicky. She’s had a hell of a 2020, with pivotal supporting roles in Beasts Clawing at Straws and the Oscar-nominated Minari.
She does what she can in writer/director Kim Ki-young’s inexplicably titled Insect Woman.
Oh my God, what a trainwreck! What is going on here? Youn plays a teen with nowhere to turn once her father returns to his wife. Now her mother, older brother and she must fend for themselves. But how? Well, maybe she can be mistress to an impotent (or is he?!) high school teacher.
The film swings back and forth between highly irrational melodrama to profoundly unsexy eroticism to unconvincing gritty street indie. An hour or more into this, they introduce a vampire baby.
I swear!
Then it’s on. Who knows what the hell is happening or is going to happen or why it’s happening or what the film is trying to say. If it were a better movie I’d think Insect Woman was trying to make a point about misogyny and classism in South Korea.
Yes, I am a sucker for films containing devastatingly
adorable little kids. Sue me.
Minari fits that bill. Writer/director Lee Isaac
Chung essentially recreates the story of his own family’s struggles to become
farmers when he was 6. The character based on the filmmaker is played by Alan
S. Kim (that little face!), and though Minari is not told exclusively
from his perspective, his presence—and the innocence and chaos that
represents—suits the effort.
Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) were having problems before making the move to a tiny plot of Arkansas farmland. As Jacob struggles to turn their fortunes around, he brings his mother-in-law to live with them to make his wife happy.
Lucky for us all Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung, a treat) is a
stitch.
The dynamic within the family is sweetly authentic, and the levity never overtakes a scene. There’s a tenderness here that, along with moments of joy, elevates the seriousness and even desperation of the family’s situation.
Chung’s cinematic style quietly beguiles. There is enormous
struggle in nearly every scene, but it’s told with gentleness and grace. It’s
the rhythm to a song made up of so much more. Chung’s skill as a storyteller is
immense, but he couldn’t have created such nuance without such a game cast.
Yeun proves again the depths of his talent. If you missed
his menacingly perfect turn in 2018’s Burning, you should definitely
watch that right away. To the same degree that his character there was
conniving and calculating, Minari’s Jacob is earnest and warm. You ache
for him to succeed, and not just as a farmer.
Likewise, Han hits no false note as an involuntary Arkansan.
It would have been so easy to oversell the bitterness or disappointment—as it
would have been for Yuh-jung to have gone bigger with her “crazy granny”
character. But broad strokes are nowhere to be found in this delicate drama.
Plus Alan Kim is just so damn cute.
Minari offers a close look—optimistic, but not sentimental—at the American Dream. If you feel like that’s been done to death, that just means you haven’t seen this movie yet.
