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.
Review of Dancing at the Blue Iguana
