Family Ties

My thoughts on Invention, Sinners and The Wedding Banquet

As Invention, the intriguing new film collaboration from director Courtney Stephens and writer/star Callie Hernandez, opens, Carrie (Hernandez) has returned home following the death of her estranged father, a medical huckster who used to hawk dubious miracle cures via later night infomercials back in the day, to deal with the matters of dealing with his remains as well as his estate. She goes through these alternately hideous and mundane particulars at a distance that seems to be borne more out of ennui than of any sort of grief towards a man that she feels she hardly knows. Although the various legal claims against her father take care of virtually all of his estate, the man known as Dr. J did make sure to leave her the patent and prototype for what is described as an “electromagnetic healing device” of his invention. This piques her curiosity and she sets off to learn more about both the device and her father through some of the people who knew him better than she clearly did and finds herself confronting both her own memories of the man and the possibility that he might have actually been on to something with the creation that he passed on to her.

Invention is the kind of film that some will find absolutely fascinating and others will write off as a tedious and pointless slog—I find myself siding with the former in this regard. Blending a fictional narrative with autobiographical elements—the old videos showing Carrie’s dad which represent our only views of him are actually of Hernandez’s own father who did pass away back in 2021–and moments where the fourth wall is broken in a disarmingly offhand manner, the film moves along at an unhurried and off-kilter tempo that veers from weirdo humor to conspiracy talk to the entirely relatable look at a young woman struggling to process the loss of someone who she hardly knew and who remains an enigma even after his passing with all of the elements anchored by a quietly impressive central performance from Hernandez. Since the various plot threads never really come together in the end, those who prefer their stories to be all tied up at their conclusions will probably find Invention to be a slow-paced exercise in frustration. However, if you are someone who likes it when a film is daring enough to allow you to interpret and process things according to your own experiences instead of simply following familiar templates that tell you how to feel at any given point, there is a good chance that you will find it as intriguing as I did

.Set in the early 1930s, Sinners, the eagerly awaited mystery project from Ryan Coogler, opens as identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), having long ago left their small town of Clarksdale, Mississippi for the battlefields of Europe and the mob-owned streets of Chicago, have returned home from their adventures with a fat wad of cash, a truck full of booze and the intention of starting up their own juke joint in a remote barn that they have just purchased. Over the course of one long day, the two go about preparing the place for opening, recruiting the musical talent to play for the hoped-for crowds—including hard-drinking blues man Detroit Slim (Delroy Lindo) and their own younger cousin Sammie (Miles Carlton), a young guitar prodigy whose gifts place him in conflict with his preacher father—and having tentative reunions with the women they left behind, including Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), who had a child with Stack who died in infancy and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a biracial friend of Smoke whom he left because he feared that her ability to pass for white would put her in danger if they were seen together. While all this is going on—and if you have somehow managed to avoid the trailers and ads up until now, you should bail out on this review right now—a mysterious man named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) turns up unexpectedly at the home of a white couple who invite him in, only to discover too late that he is a vampire. The three of them eventually proceed to the packed juke joint and things proceed to get very messy for all involved over the course of the equally long night.

Needless to say, Sinners is a crazily ambitious work that spends almost its entire first half illustrating both the all-too-real horrors of life under the rule of Jim Crow and the occasional pleasures that could still be experienced by those whose lives and cultures otherwise placed them on the margins of society via a loosely sprawling approach that is suggestive of one of the big-canvas works of Robert Altman before bringing the supernatural terrors to the forefront in the second in true Grand Guignol fashion. Cashing in the goodwill that he built up via the Creed and Black Panther franchises, Coogler is clearly swinging for the fences throughout here and while everything on display does not quite add up—hardly a sin considering the huge number of ingredients that he has tossed into the mix—the stuff that does work is so impressive that you are willing to forgive the fact that he has not quite managed to fully develop the relationship between Smoke and Mary and come up with any new twist on the familiar vampire lore. The film looks impressive throughout, contains a number of strong performances across the board (with Lindo ending up as the MVP) and one extended sequence—a showpiece set in the juke joint at its peak that essentially turns into a ecstatic celebration of hundreds of years of Black music and culture in which the past, present and future come together before our eyes—that is such a delight that I wouldn’t be surprised if audiences in theaters break out into applause when it concludes. And if you do go to see Sinners—and you probably should, despite the unevenness at times, if only to show support for films of this scale that aren’t merely exploitations of familiar IPs—be sure to stay in your seat when the end credits begin to roll, lest you miss what I predict will go down as the most surprising, entertaining and moving cameo appearance of this year and probably the next few to boot

.Based on the 1993 film that proved to be the breakthrough feature for Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet tells the story of two LGBTQ couples living in the same Seattle house who are both facing crossroads in their respective relationships. Min (Han Gi-Chan) is more interested in pursuing his life as an artist than in entering the family business and his grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) back in Korea—who is unaware that he is gay and has been with boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) for several years—insists that unless he does, he will be cut off from the family fortune and forced to return home. Alas, because of issues of his own, Chris is not quite ready to marry him, even though it would provide Min with a green card. Meanwhile, lesbian couple Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are struggling to have a baby and have just spent a lot of money that they don’t have on failed IVF treatments, causing certain tensions in their own relationship. Soon, Min hatches a seemingly brilliant plan that will solve both their problems—Min will marry Angela so that he can get his green card and stay and in return, he will pay for another IVF treatment for Lee. It sounds like a reasonably foolproof plan and it even has the backing of Angela’s insanely supportive mother (Joan Chen) but it soon hits a number of complications that I leave for you to discover, save for the fact that the suspicious Ja-Young has unexpectedly chose to fly in from Korea to assure herself that Angela is not just a gold digger after the family fortune.

Although this version of the film follows the broad basic parameters of its predecessor, the screenplay by Andrew Ahn (who also directed) and James Schamus (who also co-wrote the original) has been reworked in a number of key ways in order to reflect the ways in which the the gay rights movement in America has evolved over the last 30-odd years. Although the setup sounds like pure screwball comedy, both the story and characters have been fleshed out in real, recognizable and often surprising ways so that when matters do take a turn for the serious—such as Angela’s barely-disguised resentment at her mother for her current overcompensation for her initial less-than-supportive reaction to her sexuality and the conflicts that arise between the two couples as they try to go through with the plan—those scenes hit with a surprising amount of force. The performances are strong all around with Youn (who you will remember from her Oscar-wining turn in Minari) and Chen stealing every scene they are in as they try in their respective ways to reconcile the traditions regarding relationships and sexuality that they grew up under with those of the current generation without coming across as hokey or caricatured. Although loaded with plenty of charm and laughs (with the scene in which Angela and Lee race to de-gay their house before the arrival of Ja-Young a definite highlight), it is the humanity on display throughout The Wedding Banquet that makes it both a lovely movie in its own right and one of the few remakes in recent years to actually be worth a damn.