Gay Film Fest: Bam Bam and Celeste June 24, 2006

In her first starring role in a feature film, Margaret Cho co-stars with Bruce Daniels to create the ultimate faghag buddy movie. Completely retro-modern-fabulous, the film starts out on the day of senior prom. Celeste (Cho) and best pal Bam Bam (Daniels) are serious new wave-punk hybrids whose originality and fierceness win them no points with the school's popularity fascists. Prom night is a disaster.

A quick fast-forward to the present finds Celeste and Bam Bam working at the local salon providing mullets to the patrons. But wait - a zany harebrained scheme is just around the corner! When they see their high school nemesis on a talk show doing makeovers from a New York salon, they leap at the chance to enter a contest on the show, move to the Big Apple and open their own salon. So begins a most excellent road-trip and big-city adventure.

Lorene Machado (who directed the concert films Notorious C.H.O. and CHO Revolution) directs a cast of crowd-pleasers including Alan Cumming as a geeky, self-effacing television production assistant, Wilson Cruz as a lonely gay motel manager, Kathy Najimy as a kooky psychic, Jane Lynch (the dykalicious dog trainer from Best in Show) as a "lesbian Lone Ranger," and Harold and Kumar's John Cho as the bitchy makeover show host, in a perfect combination of insider homo hilarity and straight-up funny.