Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The experimental dramatist Pirandello once wrote a play called "Six Characters in Search of an Author". Too bad that title was already taken, because it describes this movie to a "t". 

Except that they also needed a director. It's hard to believe this was directed by the same guy who directed that noted award magnet, Il Postino. Certainly nobody can say director Michael Radford is stuck in a rut. His earlier films include 1984, Delta of Venus, and B. Monkey, in addition to the critically-acclaimed Il Postino. Now he's using his considerable talent to bring us a sad, arty, improvisational, stripper movie.

It's good to know that, unlike most mad creators, he's now decided to use his genius for good instead of evil.

It must work the same as the rule which requires directors to hire Billy Zane if they make a story about a sinking ship.

Seriously, the process of creating Blue Iguana was sorta-kinda interesting. It worked like an actor's workshop. The actresses were offered the parts as strippers, given a very rough description, then asked to invent a characterization for the film. Once the characterizations were established, they started interacting improvisationally.

Daryl Hannah did some funny improv. She's more talented than I thought. A social worker was interviewing Hannah to see if she was fit to provide foster care. Hannah was a doper, a ditz, lived in a rat-infested hovel without heat or A/C, and a was a stripper to boot. The social worker asked "what can you give this child?" Hannah's answer - "well, I have a teddy bear from when I was a girl, so they can have that, and I can make a really good fluffernutter". The Hannah character had also adopted Adam West as her father, although ol' Batman doesn't know about it yet. My favorite of her lines was when she asked a policeman to take a picture of her in front of her billboard. He asked, "wow, is that you?" She answered, "yes, but I'm a lot smaller."

I have to say the film isn't a total failure because I got emotionally involved and interested in a couple of the scenes, and when the film ended, despite 123 preceding minutes of unstructured rambling, I was actually kind of disappointed to see it end. I wanted to find out more about the characters. That implies that this might have been a brilliant experiment if the women had done some of their improvs in front of the camera, then some writers had written a more tightly-woven story involving the characters that the women created. As it is, however, it just rambles on and seems to end in the middle, and most of the threads introduced in the improvs just never get resolved. Frankly, it's hard enough to be an actor without having to be a writer as well.  

I still don't understand a crazy sub-plot with a Russian hit man who stalked the super-bim character played by Daryl Hannah. I think he was planning to kill a stripper with armor-penetrating bullets. I guess the strippers wear body armor in Russia. That way, they save on their insurance rates, and pass the savings on to you. 

There are some effective parts of this movie, good scenes and good characterizations - but there is no whole. They had the core of a good movie here, but they never really built on it.