I think I'll watch any copy or remake, at least for a while, because its fascinating to have one movie folded onto another. In this case, the original was attractively strange. We knew it came from someone who celebrates not just trailer park kitsch, but the peculiar self- referential sexual edge. It was joyful trash, and not from the South. On that, Waters laid a veneer of a genre, but the thinnest of veneers. His poke in the eye was intended very seriously.
Now the formula is reversed. We have a stage show that takes itself seriously, and the poke in the eye? Well, that's now gone, replaced by stylistic nods. Travolta in drag is a joke, but a simple movie joke, not a statement about the edge of the world. There's a moralistic story here about integration that ends happily. In the original, we know that what we see is one positive event in a sea of reverses. We have our fat girl in both, but in the original she was deliberately pathetic and the whole world of similarly pathetic creatures saluted. Here, she's triumphant. Having Queen Latifah on board in such a prominent role assures that. For once, she was appropriate for the purpose.
Its all another reminder of how we absorb the deviant. We had the hippies for less than a decade before they became a "lifestyle." We had true black heros, and they were swallowed in a glueball of hiphop. Waters is no great shakes in the grand mastication of society. But he was boldly perverse (within the rating system). And here, that perversion becomes simply set dressing for an old fashioned song and dance show.
Its perverted.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
