Joey Arias Movies

In the mid-1990's, when Rudy Guiliani took over as mayor of New York City, he began a campaign to clean up the city, shutting down many of New York's sex clubs and wilder nightspots while turning the Times Square area into a Disney-friendly tourist destination. However, not every New Yorker was happy about the heavy hand being put upon the city's libertine community (especially given the cleanup's emphasis on gay clubs), and Michael Schmidt, a Big Apple party promoter, began staging regular parties at a Tribeca club called Don Hill's as an act of defiance against the new PG-rated New York. "Squeezebox" was originally intended to be a night where drag queens would give up lip-synching to records for the night and belt out their favorite tunes to the accompaniment of a rock band, but in time it grew into an "anything goes" showcase in which gays, straights, punks and club kids mingled in a party that celebrated freedom and self-expression for all as well as a wild good time. John Cameron Mitchell's acclaimed show Hedwig and the Angry Inch began as a workshop production at Squeezebox, and performers who graced the Squeezebox stage included Deborah Harry, Boy George, Jayne County and Antony Hegarty (who would later gain fame with his group Antony and the Johnsons). Filmmakers Steve Saporito, Zach Shaffer and Sean Pierce tell the story behind New York's wildest party and talk to a number of the people who made it possible in the documentary SqueezeBox, which received its world premiere as a special Midnight attraction at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Patrick Swayze plays Vida Boheme, a classy and long-reigning drag queen. With his understudy Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes), Vida wins a New York drag stage contest and an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood. But when Miss Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo) cries at having lost the contest, soft-hearted Vida cashes in the airline tickets so the three of them can take a car out West. The film becomes a strange sort of buddy road movie, with the three cross-dressers traveling across the American heartland in a shiny yellow Cadillac. First they tangle with Sheriff Dollard (Chris Penn). He stops them for a minor traffic violation, puts the moves on Vida, and Vida knocks him out, so they flee. Later, they are stranded by car problems in a small town in Nebraska. Renting a room in a hotel, they put some life into the town and its annual strawberry festival. They provide a mousy local woman, Carol Ann (Stockard Channing), with new role models of assertiveness. They also insist on chivalrous treatment from the local good old boys and give lessons on courting to a teenage girl. This film was released on the heels of the more outrageous Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which featured Terence Stamp as a drag queen. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

Paul Reubens's followup to the box-office hit Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is just as outrageous and cartoonish, though not as good. This time, child-man Pee-Wee runs a colorful farm, chock full of talking animals and outsized produce. On the morning after a tornado of Wizard of Oz dimensions, Pee-Wee awakens to discover that a travelling circus has been deposited in his back yard. Befriended by circus owner Kris Kristofferson, Pee-Wee takes an acrobatic job, hoping to impress lovely trapeze artist Valeria Golino--thereby incurring the jealous rage of his hometown sweetie Penelope Ann Miller. When the circus is faced with bankruptcy, Pee-Wee comes up with a brilliant idea: why not stage a three-ring spectacular celebrating the wonders of agriculture? A partial takeoff of such earlier sawdust-trail flicks as Martin and Lewis' Three Ring Circus and Disney's Toby Tyler, Big Top Pee-Wee is generally entertaining, but goes off in too many directions at once, leaving a lot of loose plot ends and underdeveloped characters. Also, Pee-Wee's overactive libido (at least in this film!) is not all that suitable for his younger fans. Even so, there are plenty of hilarious set-pieces. Big Top Pee-Wee was produced and cowritten by Paul Reubens. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi