Written and directed by wes hurley. A card at the start tells us it's vladivostok, 1985. We see potato as a young school boy, with a pretty bleak childhood. The characters mostly have monologues, as if they are talking out loud to themselves. The big dream is to move to america, so mom can be a mail order bride to some rich american. The jesus bit and the "going to america" dancers weren't really necessary. But it feels like the script was short on material, so i guess that was filler. But... have they jumped out of the frying pan into the fire? Mom's new husband is a strict paranoid, conservative. And has no room for a gay son. But there are more secrets to come out. Can this all be worked out without anyone being sent back to russia? This one starts a bit rough, but gets better as it goes along. Entertaining tale, for sure. I wonder how much of it is true.

This movie feels like what would happen if Wes Anderson were forced at gunpoint to make the worst movie possible about a gay kid in the Soviet Union. The movie attempts to be "deep" by invoking surrealist imagery, but it comes off as just being oafish, stilted, and unintentionally comical. Surprisingly, the cast has some well-recognized faces - but they're too weighed down by this heavy handed script to become their own organic characters. Instead, they're just frozen in place as superficial, one-dimensional fixtures decorating the background of this egotistical dollhouse posing as a feature film...it was nice seeing Rickety Cricket in a movie though!