Baghead has been making the festival rounds since Sundance and it may be the perfect festival film. There are a few brief moments where things don’t work quite right, but overwhelmingly this simple independent film works perfectly. It is one of those movies that you will be glad you saw “cold” (without any ideas about what it is or what you might compare it to) and if you love independent film — any kind of independent film — you will love this movie. If I say any more I might spoil it for you, so I’ll leave you with the plot outline from IMDb:

The Duplass Brothers explore the minutiae of relationship dynamics in this in-depth study of a group of desperate actor friends. And a bag […on] a head.

Stephen Chow is one of my top 5 favorite directors (and actors), as much for his effervescent delivery as the diversity of stories he has overlaid with his kung-fu parody base. From celebrity chefs and wanna-be actors to soccer training and twisted 1940s dance-sequence versions of Seven Samurai, his consistency of laugh-out-loud frivolity and heart-warming characters is unmatched in cinema world-wide, not just Hong Kong. His new movie CJ7 is another step into unfamiliar topics and genres wrapped in his comfortingly familiar trappings. As an uneducated dirt-poor father of a young boy he struggles to pay for his son’s private schooling, picking the bulk of their food and lifestyle in their airy hovel from the garbage dump. When he brings home a green rubber sphere from the trash heap in hopes of compensating for not being able to buy the latest electronic robo-dog, it reveals itself to be an advanced dog/toy/tool from outerspace. Conflict, hilarity and even a little bit of kung fu ensues much to the viewer’s delight.

It is difficult to market foreign family/children films to the US because of the breadth of cultural differences and acceptances, not to mention that, if American adults are so afraid of subtitles, how can they be expected to teach their children the joy of foreign cinema. With words like d—-head and bull—-t spelled out clearly in the subtitles (once for the former, twice the latter), some parents will find themselves having to define/explain them…hopefully after the movie. However, with the introduction of Ni Hao, Kai-lan maybe we are seeing a shift to accept even more cultures into kid-fare entertainment and more parents will want to expose their children to warmth of this touching movie that is, in the end, better than most US family fare.