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Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000)
Director: Michael Radford
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
This bold, not to say foolhardy, strip club exposé aims to get under the skin of five women who doff their stuff at a suburban LA fleshpit. Radford enlisted his actresses in an experiment in improvised character construction, but the result is not so much a Short Cuts-style kaleidoscope, as the celluloid equivalent of a particle collider. Spanning a week or so in the women's lives, the result is over-burdened with incident and trauma, as each character vies for screen time, picking at some psychic scab or teetering on a brink, in rococo style. Hannah's Angel, a ditsy blonde dreaming of child adoption, flirts closest with cliché; Tilly's histrionic, downward-bound Jo supplies the bitterest material; Ayanna's underage, overconfident Jessie gets somewhat lost in the mix. Most interesting is Sandra Oh's Jasmine/Kathy, through whose liaison with a fellow poetry aficionado the film finally finds a glimpse of heart. Radford waves his camera around in sub-Steve Bochco fashion, torn between talk and tit, but fails to thread it all together.Author: NB
Cast & crew
Director: Michael Radford
Producer: Michael Radford, Sheila Kelley, Damian Jones, Graham Broadbent, Etchie Stroh, Ram Bergman, Dana Lustig
Cast: Charlotte Ayanna, Daryl Hannah, Sheila Kelley, Elias Koteas, Vladimir Mashkov, Sandra Oh, Jennifer Tilly, Robert Wisdom, W Earl Brown, Chris Hogan, Rod Rowland, Kristin Bauer, David Amos full cast
Duration: 123 mins
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