Feast On This

Having missed Spa Night when it came out in 2016 I only came around to writer-director Andrew Ahn when I saw his 2019 film Driveways at Tribeca that year. But that movie stirred something deep in me (see my review here) so I've been ecstatic to see bigger name actors running wildly toward Ahn ever since -- in 2022 with his sweet queer comedy Fire Island and now this past weekend his updated re-do of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, which on paper feels blasphemous but in practice is turned into a glorious ode to queer family by Ahn. The new film stars Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie-Tran, Han Gi-Chan (seen above, a real revelation in the swoon department), Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-jung, and as I say in my just-dropped review of the film over at Pajiba -- everybody's great in it but it's Youn who steals the whole thing, giving a performance I immediately fell head over heels for. I love this even more than the performance in Minari that she won her Oscar for (and I loved that movie and that performance). All around another grand success for Ahn, and for the rest of us a soothing super-gay balm in trying times. A warm and funny gift of a film!