The Cotton Club (1984)'s comments

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Zeltaebar

The Cotton Club has style, I'll give it that, but the production is marred by too many plot-lines and too many characters. The movie would have improved greatly with a stronger sense of focus. The worst narrative strain is that of a couple of black tapdancers who spend a big chunck of the movie tapdancing. Also, romantic entanglements concerning one of the tapdancers with a mulatto singer. Both of those elements are painfully boring and seems totally unrelated to the rest of the movie. There are far more sparkle (and sense of danger) in the romantic entanglements between lead Richard Gere and the young and splendid Diane Lane. The strongest performance is, however, that of Bob Hoskin's mob boss, a real powerhouse performance! I wish the movie could have been more about him.

9 years 2 months ago

fonz

Francis Ford Coppola died sometime in the late 1970s. He was promptly replaced by a look-alike that had very similar tastes so no one would notice. Unfortunately, FFC-redux' talents did not extend to cinema and all of his work after 1979 seems extremely amateurish.

If The Cotton Club was made before The Godfather or anything else FC made during the 70s, then yes it can and should be considered a classic. This movie is the poorly crafted student film that financiers would see and say "Hey, this kid's got talent." But as it came after he already made masterpieces, the financiers are saying "What the fuck?"

I liked the dancing sequences but they had no business being in here. If anything it seemed like there were two 90-minute pictures mashed together to create one incoherent mess.

Reading the production history of this film on Wikipedia is far more interesting than the movie itself. Financial backers included an Arab arms dealer and a vaudeville promoter who was eventually murdered. Five scripts written in one non-stop 48-hour period, contributing to an approximate total of 30-40 total scripts produced. Robert Evans was the original director before he woke up out of his cocaine coma and realized that his time would better be spent planning murders and trafficking cocaine.

10 years 2 months ago

Blocho

quote:
Francis called me when I was practicing taekwondo in my dojo. I have no idea how he got the number. I specifically told Miki, the front-desk lady, not to take any calls for me, least of all from my uncle. Anyway, he said he wanted me to play a gangster, and I said definitely. I didn't know he was going to trap me as the eleventh lead. How the fuck did I end up as a guy who doesn't sing or dance in a song-and-dance movie? I said I was done with Francis after that, but he forced me into doing Peggy Sue Got Married a couple of years later by cheating me in a card game. Lesson learned: Never play stud poker with your family at Thanksgiving. Stick with draw or pai gow. I got him back though when I fed his pet hamster to my two boa constrictors, Hideki and Umberto.

2 years 9 months ago