#1 Cheap Hairspray (Full-Screen Edition) Reviews
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Turning Hairspray into a musical could have been a disaster, and I watched it with a desire to hate it...but found myself won over instead. I think Michelle Pfeiffer and Queen Latifah keep things real, preventing the satire from going completely to saccharine.
There was one big exception to my loving this movie. My next comments will likely be the minority view, but I think John Travolta completely missed the mark. OK, we always knew he wanted to put on a dress (well some of us did anyway) so no surprise there. Also, I give him his props for giving ET his interpretation and sticking with it. Yet...it doesn't quite work. Playing it pathetic and needy was (and is) in my opinion a mistake. Whether Divine or someone else, no self-respecting drag queen would ever be caught dead showing vulnerability. And self-loathing would be subtextual, rather than surface. So, in a way, he played ET as a "real" overweight straight woman, when the reality is he is a man in a dress pretending to be a woman...and we are supposed to take this seriously? They should have cast someone playing a drag role with some "edge" or simply cast a straight woman, but an outwardly vulnerable drag queen interpretation doesn't play in my view. Straight audiences probably have no idea what I am driving at, but I bet a lot of "other folk" get what I'm saying. The only analogy I can give (and it's a bit strained) would have been to cast Motormouth Maybelle with a white actress, in "person of color," slightly over the top makeup, and then treated it like it was totally for real rather than a put on.
Fortunately, the movie as a whole is so good that the ET role doesn't sink the movie, and I'm sure 90% of the people who watched the movie found his portrayal just dandy.
Hairspray (Full-Screen Edition) Overview
It's 1962, and change is in the air in Baltimore. Tracy Turnblad, a big girl with big hair and an even bigger heart, has only one passion--to dance. She wins a spot on the local TV dance program, "The Corny Collins Show" and is transformed overnight from outsider to irrepressible teen celebrity. But can the trendsetting Tracy win the heart of teen-dream Link Larkin and stand up for what she believes in, despite the program's scheming stage manager? All she needs is her best friend Penny, a toe- tappin' beat - and a little HAIRSPRAY!
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