Date: Thu, 14 Sep 1995 15:43:57 -0500 X-Sender: kevyn@pop.ksu.ksu.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Manhattan Queers Email List From: kevyn@KSUVM.KSU.EDU (Kevyn Jacobs) Subject: WONG FOO a limp comedy Sender: owner-mq%casti.com@KSUVM.KSU.EDU Precedence: bulk FROM THE MANHATTAN MERCURY SEPTEMBER 13, 1995 ============================== 'NOTE: TO WONG FOO' IS CURRENTLY SHOWING AT WESTLOOP THEATER IN MANHATTAN ====================================== 'Wong Foo' limp comedy by G.W. Clift Drag has never been all that big in America. The English find the idea of men dressed (and made up) as women to be great fun, and they have several celebrity female impersonators, including the very, very popular Danny LaRue, who are on the TV talk shows (wearing designer dresses) and in the casts of Christmas pantomime theater shows. LaRue once told me that the reason Americans haven't theretofore enjoyed drag is that we think like Freudians and assume sexual orientation on the basis of costuming. Could be. But to separate a sexual preference for male partner from a wardrobe preference for frocks is to understand drag a satire of women. I suspect the truth is that Americans assume the sexes are more alike than do the English, so that we don't think it is funny (or even odd) to see women dressed in jeans and T-shirts and other traditionally male clothing. At any rate, I didn't find the idea of Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze dressed in anachronistic female get-ups and caked with lipstick and eye shadow to be particularly funny. But that's the joke in the new movie titled: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. If the idea sounds funny to you, please--go and enjoy yourself. But don't go expecting an American re-make of the recently Australian film Priscilla--Queer of the Desert. True, it was also about three men, one a mentor, one a leader, and one a neophyte, traveling the highway through theoretically unfriendly territory to a show business job. But Wong Foo departs from the development of the original, becoming instead a softer version of The Son-In-Law, a Pauly Shore film. In it Shore's effeminately hip character travels to the American hinterlands in company with a friend from his college dormitory floor, and he wins rural friends by bringing some color and some new slang into their drab small town lives. This story was not new with the Shore film, of course. It is the Rainmaker archetype, with The Music Man being another turn on the same setup. Wong Foo tries to do more than did The Son-In-Law, but it in limper, more predictable, and only a little more amusing Dragsters Noxeema (Snipes), Veda (Swayze), and Chi Chi (John Leguizamo) are stuck in an astonishingly isolated town waiting for their Caddy convert to be fixed. Threatened with rape, boredom, and the possibility that the hotel owner will go on beating his wife, they behave like P.E.O.s of the 1950s (at least the fifties that Dan Quayle remembers) and set out to redecorate, revitalize, makeover, bring-out, and correct pretty much everything they find. Given the straw man of a town the filmmakers have given their characters to work with, viewers won't begrudge the "ladies" their meddling. But they may wonder at the odd changes some of the characters make--why does Veda become so attached to Carol Ann, why does Chi Chi decide to give up Billy Ray, and why does the old lady suddenly begin talking? The most successful joke of the evening, if one can judge by the amount of laughter it provoked, was Veda's observation that when it comes to enlivening social circumstances, "Sometimes it just takes a fairy." Hedging bets, the writers have also introduced Chris Penn as a racist sheriff who tries to find the dragoons by visiting the sites on his list of "Places for homos" and who imagine homosexual love aloud in what must have been intended to be a redneck bar. So at least one American in the movie was associating sexual orientation with female impersonation. But he wasn't laughing.