Who payed the critics

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This movie shows you the different between Chinese cultures and western culture in a vivid way.However , I don't like the movie ending

Like EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, it's an Ang Lee family drama. A successful gay Taiwanese man and a struggling Chinese woman living in New York arrange to get married: he to appease and deceive his parents, she for a green card. Although not as moving as the earlier film, it has some really fun comic moments, cultural insight, strong characters, and a lot of charm. All of the Asian actors are terrific and endearing, especially the parents played by Ya-lei Kuei and Sihung Lung (both returning from EDMW). The weak link in the cast is Mitchell Lichtenstein (Wai Tung's lover), who comes off as extremely bland and too much of a swell guy. There is something a little safe and sanitized about the whole thing, but it's respectful in its dealing with gay issues and overall is a pleasure to watch with a script that flows nicely.

The gay son of a traditional Taiwanese family Gao Wai Tung (Winston Chao) has never shared the truth about his sexuality and hopes to solve this problem marrying Wei-Wei, a young artist who does only it for the green card. Everything, as usual in comedies, becomes really complicated when the family goes to New York for the wedding. I really liked the view of the Taiwanese culture. I'm from a quite funny and conservative culture too, south Italian. It's nice to see how you can look at traditions which are not yours in a funny perspective while sometimes you find really heavy your own traditions. Ang Lee is a refined director and it was to make a nice romantic comedy out of this subject. The surprising end makes you think that sometimes we create problems which do not really exist. It would be easier for everybody to face problems as soon as possible instead of trying always to run away.

An early Ang Lee film, he made this one year after his debut film, Pushing Hands, but had actually written it some six years before. Based on the true story of one of his friends in the first half of the film, Lee and co-writer/producer James Schamus take the story through a few smiles onto the screen.Wai-tung (Winston Chao) is a gay Taiwanese landlord in New York with his boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Liechtenstein). Having not admitted his sexual orientation to his parents, he is pressured by them (and tradition) to get married and to have son to carry the Gao name. Meanwhile, Wei-wei (May Chin) is on the edge of poverty. An Chinese artist living in one of Wai-tung's derelict buildings, she is looking for a green card to avoid deportation. Noticing both situations, Simon suggests they marry out of convenience, but things go wrong when Wai-tung's parents come over to New York and a wedding banquet is held.Although such a story today would have been regarded as a ordinary for a film plot, Lee's vision at the time it was made was fairly radical for certain sections of society at the time, particularly in conservative Taiwan. Lee pushed the boundaries, even including the first gay kiss scene to appear on Taiwan's screens.Despite the ground-breaking story and the fact that I am watching it almost 12 years after it was made, I didn't feel that there was a sense of believability in the first half of the film. Characters were very 2D and lacked depth. There was a lot of missing chemistry on-screen, and for most of the first half, I did admit I was a little bored. The second half after the banquet takes place, though, was much better. As the characters are exposed and plots unfold, the story becomes more interesting and was much easier to watch.However, one other gripe is the fact that the humour doesn't quite make its mark in the movie. There are plenty of opportunities to add the little smiles on peoples' faces, but the attempts to do so were fairly weak. The only time I let out a chuckle was in the City Hall wedding ceremony. Simply put, it doesn't match Ang's third film, Eat Drink Man Woman, in this respect.Overall though, this is a watchable film, and you can easily see that Lee has developed his techniques quite a long way since his early films. The Wedding Banquet certainly demonstrates why people had faith in him and recognised his talent in the early days. One for a look back.