It’s a story about a skinny boy and his crusty porn star, about Brian Dennehy’s floppy septuagenarian ass (surprise!), and an old truck with a big rusty weenie on top. It is the best film I’ve seen at SIFF this season. And it was written and directed by an early Stranger writer called Keith Bearden. If you can imagine that.

Keith’s film is called Meet Monica Velour. It took six years to make, soup-to-nuts. You can watch a clip of it here, but I don't suggest that you necessarily should, because I don’t feel this particular clip captures the quality and sparkle of the film in toto (as it were), and it might lead you to strange ideas. And please don’t think there’s any soup or nuts. That’s merely an expression.

Meet Monica Velour is a wonderful movie! It is funny and smart and sad and smart and sexy and smart and smart and smart and smart. The story begins with overwhelming post-pubescent angst, drives its rusty weenie through a corn field, and lands somewhere in between true love, Kim Cattrall’s vagina, and a portly Asian chick.

In it, we follow the journey of one young Tobe (Tobe? Or not Tobe? That is the question,), a beautiful and tragically unlaid geek, fresh outta high school. Said unlaid Tobe harbors a relentless and passionate adoration for an old 70s porn star called, you guessed it, Monica Velour.

Tobe is a connoisseur of Monica, a collector of her, and to her image he masturbates furiously, constantly. Through circumstances both fateful and weird, he is lead straight to her—after driving is rusty weenie across the entire damn country, of course. Fist fights in dirty bars and corn-field cherry poppings and petty whore larceny and sweet romance and hard lessons ensue, en masse.

Monica is played by Kim Cattrall. It is the best performance she has ever given, as a whore or otherwise. (Also, her vagina’s best performance. On screen, at least.) Her Monica is tough and brave and broken and blazing with tragic integrity. (Shut up.) Ironically, she wasn’t even first pick for the role, but Mr. Writer/Director Bearden has a story all about that, below. Please be patient!

I “sat down” (as it were) with Keith and with the star of the film, Dustin Ingram, who was honest and brave and dashing in the film, but who unfortunately kept his clothes on throughout the interview. (Geek fetishists, Heed me! Bow thee low! Your Glorious New Sexy Geek Overloard has RISEN! Worship! WORSHIP!) Keith is an interviewer’s wet dream: he drops 30 brilliant quotes per second. I barely had to exist.

About the film:
“I love the idea of a “page turn” in life. That’s what this movie’s about. And these two misfit characters go through this page turn together that finally lets them move on to the next stage of their lives.”

On Kim Catrall for the role of Monica:
“Kim kinda blew my mind. I knew her like everyone else knew her: as Samantha, and from Mannequin, and I knew she had a great persona and a lot of jazz on screen. But I never ever thought to myself, “Here is an actress who will go all out for a role. But she wants to be known as an actress now, and not just a celeb, and she put her money where her mouth is. And I’d like this movie to be that page turn for her, too, where people can still enjoy Sex in the City, but they can also say, ‘Wow…She's a real actress, she can really be another character—she can really be another human being.”

“When she auditioned, I told her that she was too beautiful for the role; that she'd have to gain weight and we’d have to make her look really, really awful. She took my face in her hands and said, "Listen: I'm rich, I don't have any children, and I want to dedicate the rest of my life to the craft of acting."

On filmmaking:
“To a certain extent all art must wear the face of the artist. And obviously, I’m all over Monica Velour: there’s me in the Kim Cattrall character, there’s me in the Tobe character, there’s me everywhere. But autobiography is not art. It’s home movies. It’s only interesting to you and a select few. I’d rather make love to an audience than jerk off in front of it. Nothing against jerkin’ off.”

On Brian Dennehy (oh my god! His ASS!)
“Brian Dennehy had two modes: Sleeping and not listening to me.”

On the real-life inspiration for Tobe:
“He was a kid who auditioned for my first film The Rathman’s Razor. He’d show up at auditions in a three-piece suit in the middle of summer, with a huge pompadour. His favorite musician was Dean Martin and he was like 17 or 18 years old. He was a virgin…and his idol was Sylvester Stalone. Who he thought was a genius. And I just said to myself, “You are a weird fucking kid.” It was very interesting me to find this beautiful good-looking geek who never had a girlfriend, who lived in this hothouse of teevee and music and media…”

On Roman Polanski and other asshole directors:
[Redacted: Possible libel.]

On where the heck the idea for Monica came from:
“I kind of wanted to talk about male fantasy VS female reality, and I began to collect these stories about these old triple-ex movie stars, and their really sad declines. They’d make a lot of money for producers for a short while, millions and millions of dollars, and they don’t have residuals and they don’t have a union. They’ve all got an expatriation date stamped on them. And, you know, what happens? We are such an anti-sex society, we can’t except those women as human beings, so when they’re “done”, they’re just pushed off a cliff.”

“I actually contacted an old B-porn star for an interview back when I worked at The Stranger. She wrote me back and said, “No, sorry, that wasn’t me…that was another actress who looked like me…but I love my fans, and if you’d like to spend the night with me, it’s $250.”

On his own first sexual experience:
“I kinda think that’s between me and my therapist.”

Touché.

Sadly, Meet Monica Velour has fled SIFF, and won’t be showing during the festival again. Keith plans for a fall release. I'll keep you updated.