A beautifully downbeat view of the dancers and their coworkers' as they spiral lower and lower.
Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2001)
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Reviews Counted:23
Fresh:5
Rotten:18
Average Rating:4.6/10
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for pervasive sexual content/nudity, language, some drug content and brief violence
Runtime: 2 hrs 3 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Oct 19, 2001 Limited
Synopsis: This melancholy film explores the intersecting lives of five exotic dancers who work at a San Fernando Valley strip club, the Blue Iguana. None of them have it easy. Angel (Darryl Hannah) wishes... This melancholy film explores the intersecting lives of five exotic dancers who work at a San Fernando Valley strip club, the Blue Iguana. None of them have it easy. Angel (Darryl Hannah) wishes she could take in a foster child or have a baby of her own - but her messy, dysfunctional existence makes this an impossible dream. Joe (Jennifer Tilly) is pregnant, but wants an abortion, and can barely keep her rage at the world contained. Jasmine (Sandra Oh) writes beautiful poetry on the side--but doesn't have the confidence to read her work aloud or take it seriously. Jesse (Charlotte Ayanna) looks for love but instead gets beaten by her boyfriend; and Stormy (Sheila Kelley) tries to forget the great love of her life: her brother. Director Michael Radford won the Best Foreign Film Academy Award for his sensitive IL POSTINO in 1994. DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA was in part developed through improvisational workshops in which the actors helped to come up with their own characters and storylines for the film; this experimental preparatory work was then shaped into a screenplay by Mr. Radford. But the true focus of the film is on the dance sequences; each woman expresses her hopes and sorrows using her body to communicate her feelings. [More]
Starring: Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly, Sandra Oh, Charlotte Ayanna
Starring: Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly, Sandra Oh, Charlotte Ayanna, Sheila Kelley, Vladimir Mashkov, Elias Koteas, Robert Wisdom, W. Earl Brown
Director: Michael Radford
Director: Michael Radford
Screenwriter: Michael Radford, David Linter
Producer: Michael Radford, Damian Jones, Ram Bergman, Dana Lustig
Composer: Tal Bergman, Renato Neto
Studio: Keystone
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Reviews for Dancing at the Blue Iguana
The result is a very believable strip club, inhabited by cardboard-thin protagonists who come across as caricatures more than actual people.
Too often the uneven script is either hopelessly strained or tediously lackadaisical.
After a full hour of Iguana I was watching the DVD counter tick by in slow motion.
Showgirls is, of course, the gold standard of the genre, so rigorously deranged it approached perfection. This one is the aluminum standard.
There's a lot of tepid exotic dancing as the girls' writhe and slither around the pole.
This, I suppose, is what happens when a director allows his actors to put together a movie -- it's sort of like letting the inmates run the asylum.
Even if Dancing at the Blue Iguana can't rise to the level of the performances of Hannah, Oh and others, it is nonetheless engaging, not without humor and an aura of authenticity.
Mostly this is a whole lot of chain-smoking and griping about men. You'd be better off renting Demi Moore's Striptease.
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