The Film excerpted from a longer review found here

What is it about Nia Vardalos that so offends? Possibly it's that vacant, expectant beam of a grammar school teacher who's told a joke slightly above the comprehension of her disenchanted charges and chooses to let her mannequin smirk tease the escape-reflex titter in place of a viable punchline. Or, possibly, it's the speed with which she's become the distaff Woody Allen (that is to say, the new Barbra Streisand), a homely person running out of inspiration and popularity who masterminds projects that cast them, inexplicably and hilariously, opposite extremely attractive performers bent into the impossible contortion of pretending ardour for their funny-looking bosses. But most likely, it's because she makes films like Connie and Carla, so wearyingly self-satisfied, they're the filmic equivalent of a good laxative: in and out of your system before you know it, but exhausting all the same. Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Collette) are a pathetic lounge act playing in airport bars when they witness, Sister Act-style, mobsters being mobsters. So they run, Sister Act-style, and they hide in drag, Sister Act-style, the twist being that they disguise themselves as drag queens and single-handedly rejuvenate the drag show scene with their awful dinner theatre theatrics (Sister Act-style). The result of all this ass-clownery is that Connie and Carla comes off as something every bit as cheesy and embarrassing as an actual dinner theatre show while the lovely Collette is made to look like Chita Rivera and Vardalos is made to look just like herself with a little more blue eyeliner. A weird subplot in which Connie woos the straight brother (David Duchovny) of one of her drag pals leads to the only funny moment in the picture when the straight guy recoils at getting kissed by what he thinks, with good reason, is a man; and an extended cameo by Debbie Reynolds leads to toying briefly with the idea that Connie and Carla is actually a satire of something. Alas, the picture is just another high concept vanity piece meant to showcase Vardalos' limited talents in as self-indulgent, interminable a way as possible--dead giveaways include the perfunctory body image speech (that still doesn't explain how Duchovny would fall for Vardalos in drag), and the strange defense of drag culture that seems actively engaged in a semi-aggressive chiding of it. Next stop: Vardalos as a size 15 dancer at the Joffrey Ballet, dating Brad Pitt, and pretending to be a man so she can study the Torah.-Walter Chaw

The DVD
Universal presents Connie and Carla on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions--we received the former for review. If it weren't for minor compression artifacts, this would be the handsomest disc to come down the pike from the studio in some time; the 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer is not afflicted with "Universal jaundice" and looks in most other ways incredible. Audio comes in DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1, with DTS a better polish for this turd thanks to its clearer reproduction of the torturous musical performances (which, in a lonesome nod to logic, are anchored at the fore of the soundstage) and dialogue. Gunshot effects have sufficient depth for a comedy. Also accompanying the film is a feature-length commentary from writer-star Nia Vardalos and director Michael Lembeck, who pretended on his yak-track for The Santa Clause 2 to have actually worked with Santa Claus. That mentality is honoured here with gratuitous praise for Vardalos, but all things considered, it's a relatively painless listen in which Lembeck divulges the weirdly discomforting factoid that there are next to no cafeterias left in American schools (leading Vardalos to ponder how a social hierarchy defines itself without the pecking order of a lunchroom) and Vardalos labels a sequence set in a Greek deli "a tribute to my people."

Video-based bonus material begins with an 8-minute block of five deleted scenes complete with introductions from Lembeck, who's inexplicably lit like Don Corleone. Wallace Langham appears in the first of these elisions as a snotty Starbucks employee, his cameo cut because its humour apparently clashed with the film's tone in context; when Lembeck reveals that this had been his favourite passage of the script, it only makes you wonder just how bad that friggin' screenplay was. Three musical numbers (totalling 9 mins.) that were abridged or altogether absent in the finished film are preserved intact for posterity, including Debbie Reynolds' full cabaret act and the original closing song, "Shake Your Groove Thing." (Natch.) Six minutes of seemingly staged screw-ups occupy an "Outtakes" reel, while the arduous 25-minute "The Making of Connie and Carla" (onscreen title: "Backstage with Connie and Carla") at least goes into a little more depth than your standard infomercial. We learn that Vardalos began the script without an inkling that Connie and Carla would become drag queens as well as that she sought out Lembeck based on the kindness he showed her on the set of the sitcom "Two Guys and a Girl". Special attention is eventually paid to the music, choreography, and Reynolds (the only interviewee to explicitly cite Some Like It Hot).

I think coulrophobia has something to do with my inability to watch "Dressing in Drag" (7 mins.)--or parts of Connie and Carla, for that matter--with both eyes open, though aspiring Ru Pauls may appreciate the tutorial embedded within this piece on the involved process of transforming Vardalos and her co-stars into transvestites. Forced previews for Along Came Polly, Field of Dreams, and the Focus Features slate precede the main menu. Note that the cover art overestimates the length of the film by ten minutes; it's what we call a blessing in disguise.-Bill Chambers