Like real drag queens, much of this film's material is old and tired. As in a real drag show, there are some stale stereotypes, bad acting, and very weak storytelling. Its title is ridiculously long, and its source material, The Adventures of Priscilla, had a crazy, breezy energy that the Hollywood version seems determined to exterminate. But what did we expect, The Seventh Seal in drag?

I could rake Thanks For Everything over the coals, but it's hard to get that worked up about it:  Wong Foo is a perfectly fine mainstream Hollywood film. It's the sort of film where you know the trio is going on an adventure because you see them driving over a bridge with loud music playing. You know the town their car breaks down in is a hick town because everyone there has two first names and nothing better to do than roll around in the gravel. And it's definitely no surprise that, through some judicious redecorating, the trio is going to bring happiness, self-understanding, and feather boas to a gaggle of country bumpkins who would otherwise have no class, culture, or joy in their lives.

Like, probably, most of the more than a million people who saw Julie Newmar the first weekend it opened, I left the theater in a much better mood than I went in. There's a bunch of funny lines, and some refreshingly blunt racial jokes.  So what's to get upset about? Well, the mystifying way this drag queen movie does everything to distance itself from ... drag queens.

Odder and more interesting than the film itself is the ways in which people spoke about it. On publicity junkets, the stars of Foo, Thanks - the ultra-macho Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo - emphasized that, while they're perfectly comfortable wearing dresses, they're definitely not drag queens themselves. Snipes, the most relaxed of the three, wore a dress on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and put Dave's hand on his knee, but he also made sure to talk about his wife and kids. ("When your family saw you do this," Dave asked, as if Wesley had been arrested, "what did they think?"). Leguizamo told VH1's Flix interviewer that "At first it was hard not to laugh at each other...the other shims...actions heroes in fine lingerie."

The director, Beeban Kidron, seems to agree: it's not really a film about drag queens, it's a film about straight men putting on women's clothes. That's the joke. Kidron shows Swayze powdering his face and Snipes applying huge gold and black eyelashes and waits for the laughter - as if the act were funny in and of itself. The film's advertising places Everything, Julie in the tradition of Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire, and it is: it's another film in which the joke is that a straight guy's wearing a dress. It worked better in those previous films because the characters were straight; the humor of action heroes in fine lingerie wears off pretty quick, and To Foo doesn't have much to fall back on.

Swayze is the least comfortable in drag, both in the film and out of it. I guess playing a guy in a dress is a bigger leap than playing a diabolical surfing guru or a dead man channelling through Whoopi Goldberg. He's having no fun, dressed in Chanel and boringly written as the film's straight-laced conscience. He rarely gets to show his body, and, worse, he has to say the line "You are a winner" without a trace of irony.

It's the Terrence Stamp role from Priscilla, which worked in Priscilla because Stamp was bitter, not sentimental, and because he was a transsexual, not a transvestite. It's one thing to make a film about men who want to be women, or who want to pass as women; it's another to make a film about men who dress up in the most outlandish clothes they can find and parade around on stage lipsynching. The queens in Julie Newmar Foo aren't women and they don't want to be women. They're poofters who like playing dress up.

But you'd hardly know it from the way the actors talk. All three actors in Thanks Julie seem to think it's better to play a woman than to play a fag. Swayze said making Foo "turned out to be the emotional experience of my life - women have no escape from emotion." Snipes - who was introduced on Letterman with the line "He got the girl in earlier films, now he is the girl" - said one of the worst parts of filming was the shoes, but told a female reporter he had no sympathy for women in heels because "you have a lifetime of practice".  Even the film's ridiculously long title refers not to a drag queen but to an actual woman - perhaps indicative of the producers' uncertainty over how to package their relatively risque film.

With the occasional exception of Leguizamo, who actually gets a small romance and some great drag queen lines ("Can't I just stay a princess," he asks Swayze, "they're so much younger than queens") the actors end up playing some sort of bizarre combination of supermodel and eunuch. One of the bumpkins puts her finger on it when she says to Swayze, "I don't think of you as a man and I don't think of you as a woman - I think of you as angel," and the comparison is apt: both angels and Swayze have no emotions and no sex lives, and neither ever wears anything but dresses. It's the least sensual film I've ever seen.

I get the feeling the people behind Newmar Foo want to do good for gay people rather than treat them like equals. Foo is filled with red white and blue color schemes, as if to say, drag queens are patriotic too. But that's only as long as they're not queer. As in other "mainstream" gay films from the same time period, such as Priest and Jeffrey, none of the main characters is allowed to be a human being. Finally, we know what every else had already learned about Hollywood. There are a lot of reasons to like mainstream Hollywood films, but good politics and accurate depictions of realistic human interactions are not two of them. The gay community's had its first brush with big stars; we'll know we've really made it when they start making sequels.

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Priscilla