Bam Bam & Celeste is another chapter in Cho’s continuing observations about what it’s like to be Asian in America, female in America, overweight in America, and just about anything other than blonde, blue-eyed and slender in America.

Celeste and Bam Bam are high-school outcasts. He is an effeminate hairdresser who is regularly beat up in the boys’ bathroom. She is an Asian-American princess whose wardrobe and make-up choices are a cross between a goth and a geisha.

High school ends, and the pair are paralyzed until they participate in “Trading Faces,” a new reality show that they see as a way out of their small-minded little hometown.

Cho, who wrote the screenplay, visits themes that will be familiar to her fans, including the petty and irrational prejudices of middle America and the difficulty of finding and traveling one’s own path.

Although the film feels almost like a series of blackout sketches, rather than a cohesive narrative, some of those sketches are exceedingly funny and feature a surprising lineup of indie royalty. Najimy is hilarious as a slightly off-kilter fortune teller. Cumming is charming as a television producer who is afraid of his own shadow. Lynch is entertaining as a pickup-driving lone ranger who rescues the pair of misfits just when things are starting to look grim.

But none of the cameo appearances are funnier than Cho herself as her Korean mother. Cho’s take on mommy steals every scene in which she appears … even those in which she appears opposite herself. — Anne Sherber
/ Home Media Magazine