Oops. She's done it again. In her first feature outing since the huge success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos is back with another harmless, uptempo crowd pleaser called Connie And Carla.
In Connie And Carla, Vardalos -- who wrote this film -- and critics' fave Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding; About A Boy) are a song-and-dance team from hicksville.
They are two ambitious women who just want to work in showbiz. All that singing and dancing since childhood has got them as far as an airport lounge in the midwest, where they sing show tunes to bored travellers.
But then Connie and Carla witness a shooting, and they have to leave town, and fast, before the bad guys find them.
They go to Los Angeles. They lie low. They go to a drag club that's auditioning new talent. Hey -- wait a minute. Could these women dress up as drag queens and pretend to be men dressed as women? And still get to sing Broadway tunes and dance? To a wildly receptive audience? At a place where the bad guys would never look for them?
Indeed they could.
The gender-bending comedy of Connie And Carla gets a hit of romance when David Duchovny turns up in the story. Also in the cast are Stephen Spinella as Duchovny's cross-dressing brother and Alex Mapa (M. Butterfly) as another club performer.
There are obvious parallels here to Some Like It Hot, and certainly Connie And Carla never pretends to break huge new comedy ground. The film is fun to look at -- all those wigs and spangles and sparkles -- and the Broadway show tunes the women sing are inherently hilarious and campy.
The big surprise in Connie And Carla is the vocal ability of the two leads. Both Vardalos and Collette can belt out a tune with the best of them. Who knew? As it happens, the best of them is in the movie, too, as Debbie Reynolds has a cameo.
Drag queens, Broadway hits, Debbie Reynolds: Can you do the math? The gay community should be stepping up to the box office for Connie And Carla the way the ethnic community did for My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
In both films, you laugh with the characters, not at them, which is the biggest draw. Connie And Carla has exactly the same appeal of My Big Fat Greek Wedding in terms of charm and innocent humour. You could bring your granny.
And you will.
(This film is rated PG)
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