Dancing at the Blue Iguana

It's a cliched "week in the life" melodrama centered on a strip club and the various women who work there (one is pregnant, one is on drugs, one wants to adopt a kid, one is a poet, etc etc), and it's pretty decent. The real question is, is it worth sitting through to get to see Sandra Oh, Daryl Hannah, Charlotte Ayanna and Jennifer Tilly perform a couple of stripteases each? Two words: HELL YES.

An odd mix of generally seedy and not-especially-erotic stripping scenes and misery porn where everything goes badly for everyone and everyone’s dreams get screwed up and lives get worse and then the movie ends. Acting is good more or less but the film is largely improvised, in the process proving why screenwriters are important and screenplays take months to write. It’s nothing personal; if I was acting in a movie and improvised the dialogue on set the dialogue would be bad too.

This might sound funny saying about a movie based on stripper life, but it becomes a little over-melodramatic to keep one from saying it's great. There are enough interesting scenes in the flick to make it a very solid watchable film though, and it is well made.