Customer Reviews

Dancing at the Blue Iguana

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Too many people (including myself) passed this by upon its release, and thankfully with the advent of Video and DVD, it may get a second shot at life.

Cast off any aspersions that this is another T&A movie. There is nudity, but it's (for the most part) tastefully done, and not always gratuitous. Unlike such moronic fare as "Striptease" or "Coyote Ugly", this film aspires to much higher ground, more along the lines of Atom Egoyan's brilliant "Exotica".

*side note* like that film, it includes a lot of Leonard Cohen and features noted Canadian character actor Elias Koteas! Coincidence?

Daryl Hannah acquits herself admirably, and Jennifer Tilly does a great job of combining pathos and comedy (the S&M scene is hysterical), but the standout here is Canadian actress Sandra Oh ("Last Night"), who plays outside of type and has you alternatively seduced and saddened along with her character.

Not to be ignored; rent it, then tell a friend. Films like this are few and far between.

If you haven't seen this movie and experienced the music you are missing out. Raw, true emotion flows from each character while at the same time your caressed with the phenomenial music selection chosen for this movie.

I'd really enjoy the full soundtrack or list of music and artists used to create the waves of emotion I felt through this entire movie.

Whatever reason you may have had for initially watching DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA -- and I suspect for many of you, it was the promise of seeing a number of moderately well-known actresses writhing and flexing in the buff -- you'll finish this film for an entirely different reason: because you care what happens to the people in this film.

There are several performances of great subtlety and nuance in DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA, performances of such heartrending mournfulness you'll come to feel that Sadness, Loss and Grief are as much characters in this film as any of those portrayed by the especially gifted ensemble of actors.

Both the men and the women in this film are such heartbreakingly damaged goods, as we come to realize near the end, they are already irretrievable, overwhelmed by their alienation and disenfranchisement. It dawns on us that there are no "happy endings" for these people. We realize much too late that, even when we first met them, they were already forever lost to the rest of "polite" society.

Everyone in DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA so desperately wants to connect to someone else; not for sex, not even for love but just to connect, to feel something legitimate, to feel something authentic, to feel something genuine.

Every character in this film is desperate to feel something else -- anything else -- besides pain, loneliness and heartache that they will make the worst choices imaginable. They will strike up the unlikeliest friendships and the most horrifically inappropriate relationships one could possible imagine; relationships doomed to failure from start to finish.

I was especially impressed by the fact that Michael Radford chose to take every "Hollywood" convention and turn it inside out. There are no backstories in the conventional, "Hollywood" sense. There are "origin stories." There are no schmaltzy redemptions. There are no false rescues. There is not a single deus ex machina anywhere in sight. The days begin, the days progress and the days end, only to repeat anew.

I also have to mention a few particularly wrenching performances --

Sandra Oh is amazing as Cathy/Jasmine, a stripper, yes, but also a literate and gifted writer who composes poetry of such forlorn longing that one can almost taste the want and the need in her heart but, despite her tremendous gift (and even the faint promise of a budding love), she is unable to rise above her self-imposed limitations. We are sad for her as we realize that only person holding Cathy back is Cathy herself.

Jennifer Tilly turns in an astounding against-type performance as a stripper of astounding emotional brittleness named Jo, who will literally do anything to keep the money rolling in. Unfortunately, Jo's emotional well-being, already held together by no more than spit and baling wire, takes a turn for the worse when she discovers a life-altering fact about herself.

Sheila Kelly is a study in "less is more" understatement. Her character, Stormy, is something of a cipher, but not because of Kelly's performance, but because that's who Stormy IS...and Kelly portrays the thorny and complex Stormy brilliantly. And I defy you to not squirm like a reluctant voyeur when you see how Stormy explores her "there's-something-not-quite-right-going-on-here" relationship with Elias Koteas, a shadowy man from her past.

My highest praise goes to Daryl Hannah, who gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Angel. As a person, as a human being, Angel is so grievously damaged, so grievously flawed, you just know she's never had a decent chance at life, much less a good life. But, at the same time, Angel so adorable and so sweetly lovable and so sweetly simple and so sweetly needy that she will break your heart.

Two moments in particular stand out:

1. When Angel applies to be a foster mother, and tries to articulate to the social worker why she would be a good mom, but doesn't have 1/100th the education she needs to express herself properly and;

2. When, after applying, Angel accidentally locks herself out of her car trying to take a picture of herself in front of a Blue Iguana billboard advertising her, only to be "helped" by a police officer who discovers a half-smoked joint in her ashtray. Her visible, palpable anguish at the thought that being arrested could disqualify her as a potential mom will stab you through the heart.

This film defies easy classification, which is just as well. It is supposed to be a difficult film to pigeonhole and I, for one, could not possibly be happier for it.

This film was made without an actual script but instead grew out of improvisations from an actors' workshop. I wish someone else would try this technique as it brings a fresh, immediate, quasi documentary feel to the whole work. I've long been looking for a bridge work between documentary and feature film and this may be it. The film is also character driven instead of plot driven because of this original premise. It is an intense exploration of the underside of the women in the LA strip club scene but it could have been set anywhere. The actress who nails such a woman leading this life dead to rights is Jennifer Tilly. You have never seen her in a role like this and would scarcely recognize her as the scheming Jim Carrey client from "Liar, Liar" or the woman with the voice worth killing in "Bullets Over Broadway." Her character spins out of control as she finds herself pregnant and in no position to be so. She has many brilliant scenes but my favorite is when she is in the waiting room at a medical clinic sitting next to an annoying goody two shoes who is an even more pregnant, obviously coddled suburban woman. Tilly eventually blows up at this woman and ends with a hilarious closing line about her kid will end up selling "goody's" kid drugs on the playground some years hence. In fact, if I had one quibble, it would be that I wish the entire film could have been Tilly's. Everyone else does a fine job too but I think a lead, sole role by Tilly here could have been Oscar worthy. Someone should give her a chance to show her full dramatic range again.

It is always a pleasure to come across an American film which, instead of showing people shooting each other or blowing things up, simply attempts to recreate in a truthful way a slice of life. For that alone, I give this film all the credit in the world, but, despite the superb acting performances, the film is not completely successful. For one thing, there is not much of a plot to speak of--much less a cohesive, unifying theme--and some of the scenes swerve dangerously close to being overly melodramatic.

Nevertheless, the film is enormously successful in the way it portrays the Blue Iguana, a strip-joint somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and the down-and-out characters who inhabit it. It looks like it got all of the details right.

Jasmine, for example, runs into an enthusiastic bar patron on the outside. Her parting epithet is, "Stay high!" This is exactly the kind of thing someone like her would say. Another girl, also outside, gets sick on the sidewalk while her boyfriend, standing alongside, makes no effort to help her, ineffectually muttering, "Are you all right?" over and over again. As glamorous as these girls are inside of the place, none of them look pretty or even make any effort to look pretty outside of it. All of them smoke incessantly, carry a little flask of booze around with them, smoke dope regularly, and take pills. Angel, in fact, spends the entire film wandering around in a drug-induced haze. None are terribly bright or educated. It becomes clear that all of them have very low self-esteem.

The acting, from the larger to the smaller roles, is superb. Darryl Hannah captures the vacant, hazy, innocent stupidity of her character perfectly. Also excellent was the actress who played Neko, who onstage is a confident, powerful, strutting symbol of brazen sexuality, but who offstage is just an ordinary looking, chain-smoking, washed-out blonde; hanging around the joint at 3:00am because she has nowhere else to go. Robert Wisdom, as the club manager, brings a great deal of nuance to his role, one which could have easily sunk into stereotype. He's so natural that it hardly seems like he's acting.

The best performances though, are that of Jennifer Tilly and Sandra Oh. You can say whatever you want about Jennifer Tilly, but this is an actress who is not afraid to take chances. Her Jo is a loud, unattractive, crass vulgarian, constantly at war with her co-workers over respect she craves but which she will never earn. She is not the kind of girl who sinuously purrs her way onstage, not her. She is the one who stomps on stage, whooping it up. Hers is not a complex role, but it nevertheless is a very demanding one, and she nails it. It should also be noted that there are not a lot of actresses out there who would be willing to take on a role like this. This is no "Pretty Woman."

Sandra Oh is also magnificent as Jasmine, the pseudo-caretaker of these girls, as she is the one person among them with some common sense and a degree or two of intelligence. In fact, outside of the place she attends poetry readings, and is even coerced into reading some of her own. There is a superb moment of recognition on her face when her new-found boyfriend convinces her that he wants to kiss her because of her poetry. It suddenly occurs to her that she can be seen by another human being as something more than a mere sex object. She is a poet!

But her moment of grace is fleeting, as her co-worker and then her boss drag her inexorably back to the dreary life she has lazily carved for herself. Her last dance, done for the boyfriend poet, and to the beautiful Moby song with the refrain, "This is goodbye," is absolutely heartbreaking. (And would have been even more so without the tears.)

But this scene is a good example of the overdone melodrama in the film also. The movie would have you believe that this is the end of their relationship, but the fact is, life is not always this neat. In real life, our lovesick poet would come mooning around after her--nobly trying to save her probably--or maybe she'd sneak back into one of his poetry readings. And the subplot with the Russian hit man was way over the top. Why drag a hit man into this? Totally unnecessary.

On the whole, though, this is a very entertaining and serious-minded look at one of the seamy elements of society, done in a way that does not glorify or grossly sentimentalize its subject. A fine film.

There's little about DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA to make the film relevant for repeat viewing. While the film's credits explain that the film's script was the result of a workshop by some of the most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen, the advertising materials quote a specific pair of writers ... so it's hard to know whether or not this was a creative film exercise that lured in some terrific looking actresses or it was little more than an arthouse skin flick.

Sadly, the point of the film has been made in other flicks with much less exploitation of the ladies: strippers -- even the professional high-priced ones -- are people, too.

OK, so Dancing at the Blue Iguana features wall-to-wall naked gyrating women. But don't let that put you off. Despite the subject matter - the lives of five strippers who work in the eponymous club (played by Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly, Sheila Kelley, Charlotte Ayanna and Sandra Oh) - and the frequent nudity, Blue Iguana is not a T&A movie. Rather, it's a compelling insight into the lives of the underclass of Los Angeles, or indeed, any one of the world's major cities.

If your cinematic tastes run to tightly plotted fare where all the loose ends are tied up with a big gift-wrap bow in the last five minutes, you'll probably it find frustrating. But if you can appreciate a film in which some issues are never quite resolved and some questions are never quite answered - just like real life - then you may be seduced by the Blue Iguana.

The film has been panned by so many critics that I must admit I started watching the DVD with some trepidation, expecting to be embarrassed for the actors. But I became so engrossed in the world of the Blue Iguana that I was actually disappointed when the film ended.

The DVD is very professionally produced. Features include a commentary from director Michael Radford; a second commentary from stars Sheila Kelley, Sandra Oh and Robert Wisdom (who plays the Blue Iguana boss Eddie); Strip Notes, a documentary by Daryl Hannah on how she researched her character in the LA strip club Crazy Girls; and some deleted takes and alternative scenes.

Much of the criticism of Blue Iguana is based on the fact that it was made without a script. The actors started with only two things: the title of the film and the fact that it was set in a strip club. Everything else, they worked out themselves - their characters, their storylines, and their dialogue - in an intense series of improvisational workshops. This approach may be unconventional, but it gives Blue Iguana a freshness and immediacy which is rarely found in mainstream films. As Michael Radford explains in the director's commentary, improv relies on nailing the scene in the first take; once it becomes too polished, it loses its sense of realism.

The female cast has been another target for critics - not because they're not superb actors, but because, in their late 30's to early 40s, Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly and Sheila Kelley would be too old to work as strippers in LA where beautiful young women exist in a buyer's market. But they bring a depth of sadness to their characters - you can't help wondering where they'll be a few years down the track.

Sandra Oh's performance as Jasmine is a standout. Jasmine leads a double life, stripping on the Blue Iguana stage and secretly writing poetry in the dressing room. After persuading her to read one of her painfully beautiful works at his poetry group Dennis (Chris Hogan) starts to fall in love with her mind. But Jasmine realises the fledgling romance is doomed. In the film's most heartbreaking scene, when Dennis seeks her out at the club, she performs her routine to Moby's "Porcelain" with its haunting refrain "So This is Goodbye". The camera focuses on her face. It's an impassive mask, but her eyes betray incredible sadness. She's wordlessly saying to him, "This is the real me. Do you still want me now?"

Putting aside its improv-based development, Blue Iguana succeeds on its own merits. If you want to see a T&A film, rent a copy of Showgirls. If you want to see a haunting, thought-provoking slice of life, get hold of the DVD of Dancing at the Blue Iguana.

This film is astonishing. What started off as an actors' workshop became a deeply moving piece of work about a group of women and their coworkers in the Blue Iguana strip club.

This movie is not intended to be soft-core pornography, although there is plenty of exposed breast and provocative dancing in evidence throughout. Rather it is about the (mostly dysfunctional) relationships that informs the lives of the dancers, the club owner, and the bar staff. The determinates of those relationships are sometimes revealed in detail, but are more commonly and powerfully, simply implied. We are given just enough evidence to make a judgement about those relationships, but never enough to be relieved of our ambivalence about them (Is he a nice man or a bad man?). The resulting tension makes them immediate and demandingly relevant.

Individually and collectively the actors all succeed in developing characters that, while not always appealing or even admirable, invoke pathos. And while each is worthy of praise there are outstanding performances.

Darrell Hannah's character Angel, is desparately attempting to achieve a measure of adequacy simply to be loved...by anyone. Her encounter with a policeman who finds marijuana in her car after she has asked him to photograph her in front of a billboard advertising the Blue Igauana invokes feelings of desparate, truly awful empathy. If there is anyone who deserves not to be "busted" it is Angel. Her "dance of love" to her unknown benefactor, when all ambient noise is obliterated by Eric Claptons' "River of Tears," and when we are thus left with nothing but the dance and its plea for intimacy, is wrenching.

Jennifer Tilly as a dominatrix simultaneously having to cope with a submissive trick wearing a leather dog collar, and an intoxicated, profoundly disinhibited coworker who needs a place to stay following a beating, is a nugget of comedy ad libbing ("Don't touch him, you don't know where he's been!") delivered so rapidly that it needs to be watched two or three times simply to appreciate the sheer volume of dialogue and acting that gets crammed into three or four minutes of movie time.

Sandra Oh delivers an understated performance that leaves us feeling drained by its restraint. We keep hoping that she'll follow what we know to be her true desire, grinding our teeth as she equivocates, tending to the needs of her fellow dancers to avoid the inevitable.

There is not a wasted character portrayal in this movie. The sound track alone is worth the purchase of the DVD. This is an adult, intelligent and ultimately life-affirming look at subject matter too easily trivialized by social preconceptions to commonly warrant such care and finesse. Although it is a sad movie it is never disheartening.

I enjoyed this movie. The acting is good and it did seem a bit slow, but I was always interested to see what happen next. But I have searched for any listing of the songs that were featured and have failed to find them. Why wasn't the soundtrack for this movie released? Great songs!

This portrayal of the lives of a group of strip-club employees works simultaneously on several levels. Initially, I would be remiss if I didn't confirm the obvious expectation that the film is titillating. There are no portrayals of sex, but there are plenty of scenes with scantily clad beautiful women. But there is another less visceral side to the movie as well. This film is the result of an improvisational process whereby the actors were empowered by the director to fill out its skeleton script. Listen to the commentary for details. Radford explains (often redundantly) the entire process in detail.

But the movie also works as a fairly realistic cinema-verite slice-of-life piece about the lives of those on the periphery of the sex industry. In fact, judging from the director's commentary and Darryl Hannah's documentary (included on the dvd), much research went into the details that make this film convincing. Of course it doesn't all work. It would be impossible considering the risks inherent in the improvisational process. There is a subplot about one of the strippers and her relationship with her brother that is not quite carried off. There are several scenes where minor characters seem to miss their marks. On a few occasions the dialogue becomes stilted or meandering. But overall this is a very enjoyable film with some strong performances. This is an exceptionally good set piece for the talents of Darryl Hannah (talents in fact that I would have never foreseen). Humorously, in one of her ad-libbed scenes, Hannah references Pulp Fiction, and how it revived John Travolta's career. If the film industry were a just operation, then this film would lead to more opportunities for the much-maligned Hannah.