It’s difficult to get excited about a remake. Even now, after years of watching brave executives hack away at the walls of the content mines with their billion-dollar pickaxes to unearth intellectual property no one could’ve imagined (or wanted), the cyclical nature of the modern movie industry is hard to get used to. No matter how often audiences demand original content, their needs are rarely met. Want to experience something new? Too bad. You’ll get “Shrek 5” where Shrek’s ogre offspring use TikTok, and you’ll like it.
But when an Oscar-winning director’s stateside breakthrough that became an essential part of countless lives and changed the direction of an entire subgenre of cinema gets remade, one has to sit up and take notice, even if their remake fatigue tells them otherwise. After all, Ang Lee’s 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet” is exceptionally special. The Taiwanese director’s second feature marked his first American theatrical release, paving the way for lighthearted queer cinema in a decade still contending with the ravages of the AIDS crisis. The film, about a bisexual Taiwanese landlord who enters a marriage of convenience with his woman tenant to quell his persistent parents, was a major success among critics and audiences. Unlike so many queer films of the time, Lee’s movie was not a sullen documentary, nor was it about HIV/AIDS or gay people who get killed or turn out to be murderers themselves. “The Wedding Banquet” was a romantic dramedy about family and love, and how difficult it can be to reconcile a breach between those two things when they are fundamentally linked.
