To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar: Critic Reviews

Slick and amiable and innocuous as hell, it's a foam-padded farce, as laboriously packaged as its three glam-sister ''heroines.''

Kidron's direction stays flat even when the actors are funny. It doesn't help that the screenplay, by Douglas Carter Beane, is so thin that one of its biggest events is the three main characters' having car trouble.

It's a glam-o-rama party until the trio hits the road. Suddenly, Wong Foo is all cross-dressed with no place to go -- but down.

Screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane pilfers not just plot elements from "Priscilla," but also stirs in big chunks of "Fried Green Tomatoes," "Bagdad Cafe," "Auntie Mame," "The Music Man" and "Cinderella."

Improbable as this all sounds, "Wong Foo" is a great deal of fun and a small step forward in Hollywood's depiction of homosexuals.

What is amazing is how the movie manages to be funny and amusing while tippy-toeing around (a) sex, (b) controversy and (c) any originality in the plot.

A politically correct comedy about drag queens? This is the American response to the superior Aussie flick Adventures of Priscilla. Macho Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo can't lift it above the routine.

Leguizamo's Chi Chi is the only one who looks anything like a drag queen, let alone a woman; yet we are asked to believe that it's Swayze's breathy Vida and Snipes' squealing Noxeema who've got their stocking seams straight.

I was turned on, and it really confused me.

No, it's not all that good, but it's too good hearted to dislike.

Imagine, "Wong Foo" suggests, a world where people stopped judging one another and simply surrendered to the silliness that's dormant inside us.