Dancing at the Blue Iguana

If John Cassavetes had had a permanent hard-on and a taste for female booty over brains, he might have come up with something like this filmed improvisation about the lives of several strippers at a small club in the Valley. Directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino, of all things), the film's improvised plot, as one might expect, relentlessly defies any kind of closure whatsoever. The strippers each fit into nice clearly delineated archetypes (a function of most strippers' personas, but one you don't expect to be as well defined in their real lives): Charlotte Ayanna as the naïf, Jennifer Tilly as the hard-ass, Sandra Oh as the poet, Sheila Kelly as the embittered cynic and Daryl Hannah as the complete freakin' loon (Hannah had such a good time that she actually directed a documentary, Strip Notes, about her initiation into stripperdom). All the ladies get repeatedly naked, which, after all, is why you're going to go see it. And there's nothing wrong with that.