"Blue Iguana" is yet ANOTHER 'serious drama' about a group of females working at a strip club, but fails as nearly every attempt before it has. If the filmmakers claim they set it in a strip club for any other reason than to get some T&A up on the screen, they are lying. There is NO other reason to set a film in a strip club other than for some T&A. As an earlier reviewer noted, they could have set this film in a hospital or restaurant and kept the same characters and storylines. Not that that would be a good thing. "Blue Iguana" features the standard stripper characters as a dozen other strip club movies; the only difference is that they are being portrayed by B-list semi-stars as opposed to C-list nobodys.
As MLDinTN notes, "we got the dumb stripper, the tough/sensitive stripper, the wild stripper, and the young/naive stripper." That's pretty accurate. Then there's the stock stripper movie plot elements: there's the abusive boyfriend(s), the strung-out stripper(s), the gold-digging stripper hoping to meet the Knight-in-White-Armor that will carry her away from all the madness, and the owner who cares far more about making a profit than about the dancers who make the profit for him. Not that all of these characters don't exist in real life, it's just that we've seen them so many times before. MLDinTN also notes, "And none of them do much." I agree so wholeheartedly with that statement that I won't even bother attempting to sum up the "plot" any differently. I've seen at least three different documentaries on strippers that have a hundred times more going on in their lives than the characters in this film. They should have just made another one instead of this weak take on a seedy industry.
Sandra Oh was good as the intellectual stripper. Robert Wisdom was good in his small role as the Blue Iguana's owner. All the other actors are amateurish at best. Jennifer Tilly and Daryl Hannah seemed to be doing impersonations of a manic-depressive Anna Nicole Smith, with Tilly being the manic half and Hannah being the depressive half. Both were ditzy druggies with whiny voices and a total lack of the powers of higher reasoning. None of the other dancers stood out.
Finally, I've been to strip clubs before and I must say that the atmosphere in the Blue Iguana is far too downbeat and moody. Slow music and depressing, lethargic dancers do not mix well. None of the dancers would make more than $10 a night, and the Blue Iguana would be out of business in two weeks. So much for realism.
RATING: 3/10--for doing the same old thing in a somewhat different way.
As MLDinTN notes, "we got the dumb stripper, the tough/sensitive stripper, the wild stripper, and the young/naive stripper." That's pretty accurate. Then there's the stock stripper movie plot elements: there's the abusive boyfriend(s), the strung-out stripper(s), the gold-digging stripper hoping to meet the Knight-in-White-Armor that will carry her away from all the madness, and the owner who cares far more about making a profit than about the dancers who make the profit for him. Not that all of these characters don't exist in real life, it's just that we've seen them so many times before. MLDinTN also notes, "And none of them do much." I agree so wholeheartedly with that statement that I won't even bother attempting to sum up the "plot" any differently. I've seen at least three different documentaries on strippers that have a hundred times more going on in their lives than the characters in this film. They should have just made another one instead of this weak take on a seedy industry.
Sandra Oh was good as the intellectual stripper. Robert Wisdom was good in his small role as the Blue Iguana's owner. All the other actors are amateurish at best. Jennifer Tilly and Daryl Hannah seemed to be doing impersonations of a manic-depressive Anna Nicole Smith, with Tilly being the manic half and Hannah being the depressive half. Both were ditzy druggies with whiny voices and a total lack of the powers of higher reasoning. None of the other dancers stood out.
Finally, I've been to strip clubs before and I must say that the atmosphere in the Blue Iguana is far too downbeat and moody. Slow music and depressing, lethargic dancers do not mix well. None of the dancers would make more than $10 a night, and the Blue Iguana would be out of business in two weeks. So much for realism.
RATING: 3/10--for doing the same old thing in a somewhat different way.