Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2001)

Various women dance at the strip club Blue Iguana. Angel (Daryl Hannah) is desperate to adopt. Jo (Jennifer Tilly) is angry, pregnant and wants an abortion. Jasmine (Sandra Oh) is a poetry writer. Club manager Eddie gets star stripper Nico (Kristin Bauer van Straten). Jessie (Charlotte Ayanna) is the new girl. Stormy (Sheila Kelley) is sleeping with her brother.Michael Radford is no drive-by B-movie director. This does have ambition of something more compelling than a simple T&A showcase. He has gathered various stripper stories together. They're fine but I don't find any of them that compelling. The movie feels scattered. I wonder if somebody who actually stripped like Diablo Cody would have more compelling stories. At least, her writing might be more interesting.

A group of dancers at a gentleman's club has to deal with personal issues when not performing. This movie is supposedly based on improvisations by the actresses and it shows. There isn't much of a plot and the story wanders all over the place. There is a plot line about a Russian contract killer that seems to have been spliced in from another movie altogether. The characters are mostly stereotypes and uninteresting. There are some funny scenes, such as Oh visiting Hannah's apartment and talking about rats in the air conditioning, but otherwise it's too long and dull, despite the flesh parade. A far more interesting film set in a strip club is Atom Egoyan's "Exotica."

Why do movies about strippers have to be so stereotypical? Strippers are women, an there are happy strippers out there, strippers with loving families, not every stripper has to be on drugs or be abused, or is stupid. After all that work the actors an director put in, I am real shocked that that is all they came up with, I expected more. Not every cliché in the book .... I thought Daryl Hannah's acting in this movie sucked, and Jennifer Tilly was too over the top ... I did like Sandra Oh's acting, and I also liked Charlotte ayanna's acting. ... It was an entertaining movie, and I liked the dancing scenes, specially the scene when jasmine first comes out an dances, she has a nice butt too. Really good body ... I thought the documentary that Dary Hannah was involved in was very good, I was sad when it was over so soon, it left me wanting more, the strippers in the documentary where not 1 dimensional like in the movie, some where strong, others were heartbreaking, others were happy, there was more sides to them than in the movie characters.

This was a movie about the lives of 5 different strippers (Jennifer Tilly, Charlotte Ayanna, Sandra Oh, Daryl Hannah & Sheila Kelley). Supposedly, the original script was intended to be built around Kelley's character "Stormy", but as the actresses got to know their own characters and grow into them, the script was adapted to feature all 5. In fact, I think the Stormy character had the least amount of screen time. It was probably the worst story of the five. None of the five stories stuck out as being great. All were average, thus, the movie was average.The five co-stars here are all good actresses in my opinion, and that saved the movie from the horrible movie it could have been. One thing I did like about the movie is that the actresses that played strippers were not afraid to play strippers. I mean that in a couple of different ways. First, and in many ways most importantly, they were not afraid to be nude on camera. Usually, even in B-movies, there is one actress who wants to play the character but does not want to do what is necessary to play the character. Lets face it, we watch this movie because it is about strippers, and therefore, we expect to see them strip! The second point I want to make here is that the actresses did their homework as far as how the stripper routines work. They obviously took a class or studied on their own the art of "working the pole" and lap-dances, etc. This gives the movie credibility. Not one of the girls looked out of place dancing in the nude. If I was grading this purely on the striptease portion of this movie, it would get a 10. Pretty good stuff.Unfortunately, this movie is being graded as a whole, and as far as the plots go, they are not quite up to par. The actresses went as far as they could with the given material and more often than not, the movie dragged on, despite the acting, itself, being quite good. I've just recently noticed Sandra Oh and I have to say, she is a pretty versatile and darn good actress.Jennifer Tilly also stepped up a bit as the rough, biker chick stripper/dominatrix on the side. She played the most troubled girl at the club, Jo, who had to deal with the fact that she was pregnant, on drugs, etc. Everything that could be wrong with her was wrong with her.Robert Wisdom also did a great job as the sleazy strip club owner, Eddie. His character was strong and was the guy who kept the girls in line at work.Overall, this was a pretty average story, despite how well the girls and rest of the cast did. I have a feeling a different cast would have made a complete mockery of the movie. As it is, I give it a 6 of 10.