To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar

views updated

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar ★★½ 1995 (PG-13)

Hot on the high heels of “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” comes the sanitized for your protection Yankee version. And its all about hanging on to your dreams and how we're all the same inside, with politically correct gay drag queens doing the sermonizing. Yes, this is the feelgood drag road movie for the 90s. Den mother Vida (Swayze), tough beauty queen Noxeema (Snipes), and hot-blooded Chi Chi (Leguizamo doing his best Rosie Perez) head to Hollywood in a 1967 Cadillac convertible that inconveniently breaks down in a tiny Nebraska town. The “girls” work their magic, and presumably the people of this uncultured, anachronistic backwater will never be the same. Onedimensional characters, flat direction, and inconsistent script undercut exceptional efforts by Swayze and Leguizamo. 108m/C VHS, DVD . Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Melinda Dillon, Arliss Howard, Jason London, Christopher Penn, RuPaul Charles; Cameos: Julie Newmar, Robin Williams; D: Beeban Kidron; W: Douglas Carter Beane; M: Rachel Portman.