As he makes his transition from “Saturday Night Live” into cinema with films like “Wicked” and Andrew Ahn’s upcoming re-imagining of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet,” Bowen Yang is taking time out to pay homage to the filmmakers who have shaped his tastes. Taking a quick trip to the Criterion Closet, he offered his praise to filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Whit Stillman, but reserved his highest appreciation for the “pope of trash” himself, John Waters.
Describing Waters as “probably my favorite director ever,” Yang took home his film “Multiple Maniacs” and highlighted the filmmaker’s ability to turn the “abject” into something “beautiful and elevated and filmic.”
“What Divine and Mink Stole do in the church, kind of the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen,” said Yang. “I’m not a pearl-clutcher. It takes a lot to shock me. John Waters is a timeless shocker.”
Moving a little further back in time, Yang selected Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 Oscar-winning drama, “All About Eve,” which follows Bette Davis as an aging Broadway star whose career becomes threatened by a young fan played by Anne Baxter. The conceit for the film has been revisited in many subsequent projects including Olivier Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria.”
“I am a gay man after all,” said Yang in choosing to highlight the classic. “Bette Davis — of course, there’s, ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,’ but the line for me, for some reason, has always been — I’ll never forget the way she says this — it’s… She turns and goes, ‘As it happens, there are certain aspects of my life to which I want the sole and exclusive rights,’ or something. And then Bill says, ‘For instance, what?’ ‘For instance, you.’ And it’s… indelible. It’s burned into my brain.”
Not often getting a lot of love inside the Criterion Closet, Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” was Yang’s next choice. It stars Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny as a pair of yuppie friends who fall in and out of the New York nightclub scene during the 1980s.
“I feel like we don’t talk about this movie enough, especially as it relates to a nightlife movie, which is so hard to pull off,” Yang said. “I’ve had fantasies about, like, doing a nightlife film in any capacity, and they’re just hard to make. They’re hard to write. They’re hard to make feel authentic. You can’t capture the feeling of going out to the club.”
Other items chosen by Yang include Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train,” as well as Jackie Chan’s “Police Story” set. Watch Yang’s entire Criterion Closet visit below.
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