Connie and Carla

Year 13, Day 25 - 1/25/21 - Movie #3,727

BEFORE: I went somewhere today!  Some place that wasn't my home or my office!  Can you tell that lately it's just been one or the other?  But I met my friend Victoria after work at a bar down in the East Village, one with partially-enclosed outdoor seating and heaters, and I had two highly-priced beers!  (Seriously, for the price of two draft beers, I could have bought an entire 6-pack to drink at home. I've never understood that.  How did bars stay in business during the before-times by overcharging so much?)  

Since the famous Katz's Delicatessen was just two blocks away, I saw people inside ordering take-out as I passed by, so I figured I'd grab a sandwich on the way home and eat a late dinner.  Texted my wife, she wanted a sandwich, too, plus an order of fries, so it turned into a rather expensive evening, but so worth it to be out and about again, sort of.  Plus I saved half the corned beef sandwich for lunch tomorrow, because it was too good to devour all at once - really, I just wanted to unhinge my jaw and swallow it whole, that's how much I love a good proper deli sandwich.  Also a bit high-priced, but so worth it.  

Also, Victoria was the last person I hung out with, besides my wife, before the lockdown began last March. We went to a beer dinner a couple weeks before restaurants started closing. So logically, due to the rules of symmetry, that means they may be opening up again, in just a few weeks. Right?  RIGHT?  I guess our governor is dead-set against NYC restaurants re-opening for anything but take-out, despite the data that shows that about 75% of COVID-19 transmissions are happening in private homes and at family gatherings.  Only about 2% have been traced back to NYC restaurants, which makes sense because all the restaurants that DID open up for indoor dining over the last few months went through massive overhauls to install plastic barriers, trained their staffs to clean and disinfect tables and counters often, and blocked off half their tables to keep diners properly spaced. Sure, let's keep the restaurants that WERE following all the guidelines closed, and let people congregate in private homes and keep infecting beloved family members.  I know this sounds weird, but based on the science, maybe we should be shutting down private homes and making people live in restaurants, it would be safer in the long run!

Toni Collette carries over again from "Muriel's Wedding".

THE PLOT: A mob mix-up sends two chanteuses screaming for L.A., where they score a perfect gig: posing as drag queens on the cabaret circuit.  Things get extra weird when a guy falls for one of the girls.  

AFTER: Naturally, the first thing this should make you think of is the 1959 classic "Some Like It Hot", where two male musicians who witnessed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre had to similarly hide from the mob, and they dressed up like women to join an all-girl traveling band, and Tony Curtis's character fell for Marilyn Monroe's singer, while Jack Lemmon's character was pursued by an interested man who thought he was a woman ("Well, nobody's perfect..."),

45 years later, the same story re-surfaced, only a LOT had changed in the world of sexual politics, there was certainly more fluidity by 2004, more openly gay people and drag queens were finally coming in to their own, after decades of being part of the counter-culture.  I have to pause for just a moment here and try to make a distinction between transvestites and gay people, I mean OF COURSE there's a lot of overlap, but it's not 100% - not all transvestite people are gay, and not all gay men dress up like women or want to be women.  But I think even in 2004 it was perceived by some as a bit of a slippery slope, like cross-dressing is a stop on the road to being gay, or perhaps vice versa.  

There's been so much happening in the LGBTQ? world that it might be almost time for another update, like what if you through transgender into this equation, and you had somebody hiding from the mob in plain sight by changing their gender?  OK, I guess that wouldn't work, but I think there are whole new storytelling avenues out there created by transgender issues that haven't even been explored yet.  A couple reality TV shows, sure, but not mainstream Hollywood fiction films, except for "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Danish Girl", that's about it. OK, "Albert Nobbs", "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and "The World According to Garp", but that's still not a lot. Still, hardly anyone's tapped into the complicated romantic possibilities that become possible when you have a character changing genders.  I have, like, maybe a few dozen questions about the logistics that I'd be way too embarrassed to inquire about - it doesn't really matter because I don't live in that world.  

The other film that comes to mind, of course, is 'Victor/Victoria", which starred Julie Andrews as a woman pretending to be a man who then could dress as a woman to perform on stage.  Debate still continues over whether this is a terrible idea for a stage act, or a particularly genius one.  And no doubt an acting challenge for anyone willing to take on this role.  I mean, you've got to be either SUPER comfortable in your own identity, or perhaps the exact opposite, just really open to ideas and really in touch with the way each gender tends to act.  Right?  Anyway, this film also has women pretending to be men dressing up like women.  

Really, who's to say that drag queens have to be men, am I right?  Isn't the gay culture and/or the drag culture all about being who you are on the inside, regardless of society's norms, and then being able to dress the way you want to dress, and feel the way you feel, and love who you love?  Why should that only apply to gay men?  If things should be opened up to all people, of all genders, all orientations, all sensibilities on the scale, then women can be drag queens - I know, there are "drag kings", too, but they're different.  Or are they?  Why can't the rainbow have a few more colors in it?  Surely there must be at least one person on the record somewhere who had a sex change and then later had it reversed, or at least tried to?  This should be just like that, a couple women living as men who dress like women.  But I guess a woman would need to have a certain "look" about her to pull this off, and one of these actresses does, and the other, not so much.  

It's probably most confusing for Jeff, played by David Duchovny in the "Marilyn Monroe" role here, as weird as that sounds.  (Duchovny, of course, previously played one of the first real transvestite/transgender role in series television history, that of Special Agent Denise - formerly Dennis - on "Twin Peaks".  I'm discounting Flip Wilson's "Geraldine" character, because that was all played for comic effect...)  Jeff's brother, Robert, also goes by "Peaches", as part of a drag duo with "N Cream", and Jeff's been estranged from him for some time.  When he gets back in touch with his brother, he not only has to deal with the fact that his brother's gay and a cross-dresser (again, those could be separate issues in real life, but not in this film) but also that Jeff himself feels some attraction to Connie, despite falsley believing that Connie is a man in drag. 

We never really find out if Jeff enjoyed kissing Connie (as a man) because the ruse is dispelled before it ever gets that far. Jeff is, however, the last to find out that Connie is really a woman, so we'll never know if he was going to give dating a man in drag a shot.  It thus becomes one of those unanswerable questions, like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  Hey, just follow the advice of Debbie Reynolds, which is, "Who cares?  If you like somebody, go for it."  Again, nobody's perfect.  

What's harder to believe is that a mob drug dealer would work so hard to track down just ONE missing kilo of product, that he'd send his henchman around to every dinner theater in the U.S. just to maybe find the one that Connie and Carla are performing in.  That guy must have covered thousands of miles in a dozen states, and that means gas, hotel rooms, Broadway show tickets, to get back what, a couple thousand dollars worth of money and drugs?  It doesn't make sense, that guy's time is worth money, too, why spend $5,000 in travel expenses to get back $3,000 in drugs?  That's not a good way to run a business, even an illegal one.  Why not check the internet for cast listings of dinner theaters around the country?  That would have probably been both cheaper AND faster, and every show needs to use the internet to promote itself.  This guy never heard of Facebook?  

Then has has to bankroll Connie and Carla's ex-boyfriends, send them out to L.A. to track down Connie and Carla, then buy a last-minute plane ticket for himself when they do.  Jeez, man, at some point you've got to let that kilo go.  Another NITPICK POINT, the big knockdown fight at the end that takes place on stage is thought by the entire audience to be just part of the act, they dismiss it as a "tribute to Guys and Dolls", and I just don't see how that's possible.  

Also starring Nia Vardalos (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), David Duchovny (last seen in "House of D"), Stephen Spinella (last seen in "Bad Education"), Alec Mapa (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Christopher Logan (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Robert Kaiser, Ian Gomez (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Boris McGiver (last seen in "The Pink Panther"), Nick Sandow, Dash Mihok (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Chelah Horsdal (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Debbie Reynolds (last seen in "One for the Money"), Veena Sood (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Babs Chula, Linda Darlow, Gary Jones, with a cameo from Greg Grunberg (last heard in Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 local productions of "Mame".