Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Dancing at the Blue Iguana is a movie which comes out of an improvisation workshop. Director Michael Radford allowed the members of his cast to develop their own characters, their own story lines and dialogue. Then Radford tied all that together into some semblance of a script and started shooting. Well, he tried to tie it together anyway. But unsurprisingly the end product is pretty much a complete mess. We follow the stories of a handful of strippers. They dance at the Blue Iguana but what is going on in their lives when they're not writhing around on stage having dollar bills tossed in their general direction? All the clichéd roles are here. We get to know the smart stripper. And the dumb stripper. And the underage stripper. And the pregnant stripper. And the stripper who's in an incestuous relationship with her brother. OK, maybe that last one isn't much of a cliché. Happily we spend very little time exploring that particular storyline because that would surely make for rather uncomfortable viewing. Does anything in the movie make for entertaining viewing? Not really. None of the various story lines are particularly compelling on their own and when you add them all up the pieces never fit. It never comes together, the whole movie is so unfocused. There's a bizarre subplot about a Russian assassin thrown in for no particular reason. No, his presence does not make any sense whatsoever. Nothing much in the film does. If there is any star, so to speak, in this ensemble piece it is Daryl Hannah. She plays the dumb one. Her story resolves around her attempts to become a foster mother. Suffice to say she's not really cut out for that gig. Sandra Oh makes a bit of an impression playing the smart one, a stripper poet. The rest of the cast, and the rest of the characters, are quite forgettable. This was an interesting experiment in movie making. But ultimately not an interesting movie.

I was expecting much more from this movie, from the cast and the director (I really enjoy Il Postino and The Merchant of Venice). But it's just another boring view at the lives of strippers... in a Hollywood fashion. Each one of the girls is a cliché: the sad one, the silly one, the wild and self-destructive, the woman with a dark past, all of them lacking a real love and a real life...come on, a far more complex point of view could be done. Knowing now that most of the dialogue was improvisational, it's easy to figure it out what was wrong...no script, no story. Near the end, the last character (a porn star on tour, played amazingly by Michelle Bahuer) is a lot credible, but is too late for the movie. The best moment is when Jennifer Tilly, looking for some extra bucks, becomes an S&M dominatrix. Not my kind of kinky stuff, but funny to see! Finally, the music chosen just don't work for strippers, too slow, too sad... like this movie.

I saw this on cable and would have been sorely disappointed if I had viewed it in a theater. It's not a very satisfying film because it's so monotone and devoid of energy--all strippers are depressed, self-hating junkies who grow more pathetic as they age. Even the facial expressions are frozen in a way that's more typical of 40-something actresses than of silicone-enhanced 20-something dancers.The movie is ostensibly about strippers, but it's really about five actresses working overtime to create their characters and show that, despite their age, they can take their clothes off with the best of them. It's hard for these well-known TV and movie actresses to submerge themselves in their roles, and apart from Kristin Bauer who plays porn star Nico (an allusion to Warhol's Queen of heroin), none of them really succeeds at it. We're supposed to be applauding them for having the courage to strip bare in front of an audience, but it's clearly an ego trip for these women to show off those personally-trained bodies in which mainstream Hollywood has lamentably lost interest. What would have been truly courageous, I think, would have been to use talented unknowns in the lead roles, but that too poses the risk of leaving the audience with five characters in search of a coherent storyline. The problem may be too many story lines that go nowhere--notably, Sandra Oh as a talented poet whose verse is good enough to get her a university fellowship, but who seems not to know it. She meets a college instructor, and there's a flourishing romance, until he realizes how uncomfortable he is with her stripping and bails from the relationship. The break-up is established through a long, mournful scene in which she dances in the club, knowing he's present in the audience. The camera never really strays from her face, which makes for claustrophobia rather than intensity. Another subplot that fizzles involves Daryl Hannah's seeming rendezvous with death in the former of a stalker who sends her expensive presents. What happens when they get together is both ambiguous and anticlimactic. Sheila Kelley's character is so underdeveloped that it could have been omitted it entirely while Jennifer Tilley's repulsive punk dominatrix suggests she's way over her head.I can't help comparing this film to HBO's plucky "G String Divas," a documentary in which the women were no more likable but far more interesting. A number had university degrees, and several saw themselves as entrepreneurs stashing away cash to beat the system. There was a contemptuous, carnival-like atmosphere in which the men were there to be fleeced and discarded. Some women had kids; some were lesbians; some were bisexual and involved in complicated relationships. At the end of the day, it seemed like a business rather than the sado-masochistic playpen for decaying flesh that "Dancing at the Blue Iguana" makes stripping out to be.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT:Dancing At The Blue Iguana is a beautiful melancholy gem of a film. It is a character study of several strippers and what their lives are like both at and outside of, the club. It stars Dary Hanna, Sandra Oh and Jennifer Tilly among others and they all give performances that are haunting, heartfelt and just fantastic. Not only was I very impressed with this movie, I thought it was excellent.Anyone expecting a variation on the movie "Striptease" maybe disappointed. This is a serious movie and while of coarse there are scenes where the girls strip, it's more about what happens in between that time when night falls and dawn breaks, and reality and the day to day struggles of life take over. It is slow moving, pensive and above all human. This movie has more humility in it's first 15 minutes then a movie like Striptease or Showgirls has through the whole thing. It's without a doubt, one of the best character studies I've ever seen.On occasion, when traveling through movie land, there are those occasional movies, (usually indie films though not always) , where you encounter movies that are less concerned with heavy handed theatrics and special effects, and much more interested in bringing you a dose of reality. I found Blue Iguana to be a wonderful haunting tale of life, love, loneliness, pain, and dreams. The whole cast was incredible and nothing, not one thing, ever feels forced. There are moments of surprising comedy such as an unforgettable moment between Hanna's "Angel" and a police officer. The movie is done in rather a fragmented way, there is a constant switching around from one story to the next but I found that appropriate to the movie.I liked, very much how all the girls played their roles, I did have a fondness for Angel, a sweet yet incredibly problematic girl, and Sandra Oh's Jasmine had the best scene in the movie, her "goodbye" dance to her new boyfriend who had not yet seen her dance, was incredibly powerful and flawless, as was the song selection. All performances were great.This is a must see for anyone who likes character studies and likes ones where the makers "keep it real." The only complaint that I have is the rather strange way it ended(and that it ended in two hours-it actually should have been longer) and the subplot involving the contract killer which I cannot decide if I liked or not especially since I still don't fully understand it in it's entirety but other then that, I have no negatives at all. This isn't for everyone, it's slow moving nature may turn some people off, but for those who do like these type of movies, I've no doubt you'll find it an exceptional film. My vote is 9 of 10.