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Grrr-man wrote on 11/10/2006:

This was not a good film by far. I felt like I was watching a shallow version of the confession room in the Real World....if there is any shallower. If it weren't for the half dozen cock shots, then this movie would be a total flop. The models kept saying the same things over again on how they are models and dancers NOT prostitutes. Then there was that one who said he was straight but was totally acting gay at the end of the film. This was totally stupid and frankly pointless. Nobody wants to here about the closed views of a couple young strippers who do know anything except how to dance. And they mostly show them dancing for women...I've enjoyed better lesbian films.

Preston wrote on 12/04/2005:

SEXY IN THE CITY, Dec. 5,2005
Reviewer: Preston - See all my reviews
A dazzling display of dance and drama, Zona Rosa has been an international film festival fave and viewing the DVD even makes it better due to the bonanza of DVD extras. Director Dan Castle has taken his camera through the infamous and intimate strip joints of Mexico City's Zona Rosa. Not content to merely record performances, Castle has conducted up-close and personal interviews with the scintillating strippers, their family members and the actual club owners. The result is funny, sad, sensational and sexy all at the same time. This is the ultimate voyeur's trip into the exploration of the male psyche behind the meat market. The 40-plus minutes of DVD extras include complete strip routines from all the performers involved in the movie, obviously rife with male nudity. Of particular interest will be the raw Big Banana contest, which would seem to validate the old cliche that size does indeed matter. Latin lovers will savor this confection of Mexican machismo.

Gay Movie Viewer (jamesvmorris@verizon.net) wrote on 11/09/2005:

I am not a person who generally buys DVD’s for their prurient value. My large collection of DVD’s boasts maybe five porno titles. But I admit I have a thing for Latin men – my boyfriend is from Ecuador – and something about the way this film was advertised made it sound highly sexual and extremely titillating. I must confess, this is the main reason I purchased it. Oops. Mild disappointment there. The film consists primarily of interviews with male strippers in the “Zona Rosa” section of Mexico City. The most in-depth interview is with an extremely handsome and pleasant but rather ordinary (in terms of lifestyle) hunk by the name of Christian Miranda. We meet his family - his son, his niece, his dog and his extremely open-minded mother, who says she prefers that her son would strip in a club that is “a little less wild” than the gay place where he currently works, but also says she never argues with his choices. Christian goes out of his way to let us know that he’s straight, but, like all the other strippers featured in the film, he doesn’t seem even slightly judgmental of his “gay clientele”. I found this surprising, because most of the dancers also emphasize how religious they are, and there is actually a short debate over whether or not they should pray at the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe before they start their evening’s dancing! I’m not kidding. Some thought it was disrespectful to the Virgin to pray before showing off their privates, and others thought that they should ask for a blessing before starting work, just like they would in any other job. Christian relates that Saint Jude is his favorite saint. As you can imagine, this got real boring real fast. Part of the problem was the ads for the movie, which promised “young men who ply their flesh working at the numerous and quite popular nightclubs of Zona Rosa” (dancers from mostly one club are featured). From the phrase “ply their flesh” I rather assumed that there would be some juicy tales of male prostitution, or at least some good hints on where to spend my next Mexican vacation. No such luck - virtually every young man interviewed stressed that they were dancers ONLY, and would not dream of hustling to supplement their income. Interestingly enough, they all criticized “some of the others” who do hustle, but none of the dancers would admit that prostitution was a part of his own experience. For a 60 minutes film, way too much time was spent on filler material between interviews – we get slideshows of scenic Mexico City while a Mariachi singer drones endless verses of Cielito Lindo – more than once. There is a fairly boring interview with an entertainer / drag queen who manages the club, although when he relates how he got his start as a cabaret singer, we get a few minutes of him on a microphone showing off a surprisingly pleasant voice. There is also a brief interview with a “gay activist” who relates a two-minute version of Mexico City gay history. “We had our first Gay Pride parade in 1979, but the first time we all got together was in 1978, for the 10th anniversary celebration of the Massacre of Tlatelolco”. Whatever the Massacre of Tlatelolco was, he didn’t get to it. I guess the filmmaker was too anxious to get back to the religious convictions of the strippers and the cozy portraits of their families. The director did make a few efforts to draw the dancers out on some titillating details, but his attempts usually went awry. “Did you get any unusual requests? What’s the strangest story you have about doing private shows?” (All the dancers do private shows for parties and even individuals, but insist there is no sex involved). “Well, the strangest I get is the (straight) couples who want to spice up their marriage, so I do a private show and the women will touch me while the husbands watch, or sometimes even the husbands touch me – but I understand that they’ve been together many years, so it’s not really so strange”. The club scenes include a “big banana contest” where three contestants come out and stick out their erect penises while a woman from the audience measures them. The winner gets 2,500 pesos. Christian, our main guide to this sordid world (slightly more sordid than a DAR convention, anyway) disapproves of this contest greatly, “What is this world coming to?” he asks. Speaking of women, did I mention that equal if not more camera time is devoted to the straight female patrons over the gay male clientele? I assumed this was to make the strippers – who never tire of telling us that they’re 100% straight – more comfortable. One does say that he actually prefers the gay customers, as the straight women are more prone to touch them inappropriately but the gay men are more respectful. The climax of the film is a return one year later to the main interviewee, Christian, who has since left the gay club and is now working at a strip club for woman. He introduces us to his new friend, an extra handsome muscular young man who is learning the business from him, and, with straight faces – and I mean straight faces – they praise each others bodies and talk about how having a nice ass is essential to attracting women. As a result, the last five minutes of this film seemed like it would never end. We then get a captioned postscript lamenting that the police have cracked down on Zona Rosa since the film was completed, and 60 clubs were closed during a two month period in 2001. Based on the scandalous goings-on shown in this film, it would appear that Mexico City really didn’t lose much. In fairness, I must say that all the dancers were all very handsome and quite nice to look at. And if they were totally straight, I suppose they could have been much more obnoxious about it. The DVD extras include 40 minutes of complete dance sequences of all the interviewees (with full frontal nudity) plus the complete banana contest. But after all that talk about praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe, I was no longer in the mood.