Ep. 4: The Wedding Banquet

May 20

Written By Charlene Wang de Chen

We discuss The Wedding Banquet by Andrew Ahn, a film that premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

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Charlene and Jackie discuss Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, a 2025 update of Ang Lee’s celebrated 1993 film starring Lily Gladstone and Bowen Yang.

Topics discussed include our favorite book to movie adaptations, how to retell a 1990s gay love story in 2025, Ang Lee being a repressed king, why we love characters in sweatpants, fake movie jobs, and how well placed plants can make a film more believable.

COMPLETE SHOW NOTES:

1:30 Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993)

2:30 “I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about” - Ang Lee, maestro of unrequited desire

5:45 Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx, published in the New Yorker in 1997

9:14 Visual representation of the plot of The Wedding Banquet (2025)

10:00 James Schamus, co writer of both versions of The Wedding Banquet

12:00 Lily Gladstone in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women

19:00 Andrew Ahn’s authentic, intimate directing style and redefining the romcom

22:45 Poster for the Wedding Banquet prominently featuring the words ‘CROWD PLEASER’

25:40 The twists and turns of Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden

27:15 Chaebol: a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and controlled by an individual or family

33:35 Running Charades, an eight out of ten in terms of fun

36:06 Robin Williams teaches Nathan Lane to ‘Act Like a Man’ in The Birdcage

36:50 List of films produced by Ang Lee and James Schamus’s Good Machine

38:33 The obligatory Romantic Comedy Grand Gesture (including Heath Ledger on the Bleachers in Ten Things I Hate About You)

43:17 Emma Thompson losing it in Sense and Sensibility

50:34 Materialists Trailer featuring Pedro Pascals 12 Million Dollar Apartment

51:25 Do I Look Like I Belong Here? Working Girl and the Secrets of Class Politics

52:53 Dakota Johnson going HAM in the Suspiria remake

53:17 Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, Non Fiction, french people getting in the literary zone

54:05 Romeo and Juliet, or Juliet and Romeo????

54:54 You Can’t Out Baz Baz

58:29 The Historical Realism of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners

1:00:23 Tony McNamara on The Great - ‘‘Historians have to know we’re making mistakes on purpose’

Full list of Movies and TV Shows mentioned in this episode:

THANK YOU for listening!

The Wedding BanquetAndrew AhnBowen YangLily GladstoneSundanceAng Lee

Charlene Wang de Chen

Episode 3: Opus