The Cotton Club (1984)

So that is the trailer from The Cotton Club, which is not a brand of bargain underwear to be found at your local Wal-Mart but rather a 1984 tap-dancing gangster saga directed by Francis Ford Copolla and staring Richard Gere. This movie was pretty much exactly what you think it’d be if you were thinking this movie would be a mash-up between The Godfather and Step Up 3D. So what kind of convoluted bullshit would ensue from that? Well let me relay the entire plot to you now:

Richard Gere is Dixie Dwyer a trumpet cornet player at the local "negra" club. One day this ugly gangster motherfucker named Dutch and his dildo squad come into the club to smoke cigars and enjoy some "negra" music. Two guys dressed as cops enter the club. They're not actually cops but rather rival mob members attempting to kill Dutch by dropping a Wile E. Coyote-sized bundle of dynamite under his table. Richard Gere saves Dutch by acting all charming and Richard Gere-ish and stuff and so Dutch totally gets a gayboner for him and decides he wants Gere on the payroll. Problem is, Dutch is a big asshole who stabs people at fancy dinner parties for no reason and Richard Gere doesn’t really like him too much so he starts fucking Dutch’s mistress who is played by a young, hot Diane Lane with a stupid flapper hat on her head in every scene.

"You mean this isn't the set of Tron?"

So while that is going on, there’s these two tap dancing brother who get a job doing some soft-shoe at The Cotton Club, which is the name of a jazz club in Harlem. One of the brothers is named Sandman and he's a much better tap dancer than the other brother so he gets to bang this half-white chick who sings at the club. Apparently, a black guy giving the ol' banana split to a half-white lady was taboo back in the late 20’s when this movie takes place. If you take inflation into account, that’d be like seeing a relationship between a blind Japanese dwarf and an obese Midwestern grandmother in a movie today. Point is...well I don’t suppose I have a point. I guess I just wanted to give you the mental image of a Japanese dwarf elbow deep in Paula Deen’s cooter. Enjoy that.

So by now you’re probably asking “Hey, I just read, like, 4 paragraphs of this stupid Nicolas Uncaged post. Where does Nicolas Cage come into play in all this?” Funny you should ask because he has a supporting role as Richard Gere’s little brother, Vincent. Cage starts out living in his brother’s shadow. Not his actually shadow, but the shadow of his trumpet cornet playing. So Cage does what any logical person would do and he starts working for Dutch as his hired muscle. I know every time I feel inferior in my life, I think, "Man, I wish I knew a guy named Dutch so I could work as his hired muscle." Eventually, Cage grows weary of doing all the dirty work for the mob for shit pay and he confronts Dutch all like “Yo, I’m fuckin’ Nicolas Cage over here! I should totally be the Godfather or whatever movie this is.” Naturally Dutch is all “Go eat a dick, Cage. I’m gonna have my consigliere fucking kill that little doofus character you hang out with because he's only had, like, 3 lines in this whole movie. In fact, here's how much your little sidekick sucks: one day someone will write a blog post about this movie and no one will mention him until he gets killed. And do you know why? Because fuck you. That's why.” So that’s exactly what happens. Then Cage is all “Freeeeeedom!!!!!” (or was that Braveheart?) and he orchestrates a drive-by shooting on Dutch’s crew which ends up killing around 4 innocent kids in the process. Gere meets up with Cage and is like “WTF, bro. You killed kids!” Cage is all, “I’m the mob boss now!” Gere is like “Sigh” except he just sighs and doesn't say "sigh". And then Nic Cage is whacked by Dutch in the next scene. This momentous occasion marks Cage’s first on-screen death, unless you count the horrible fiery death he endures as Brad’s Bud in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Of course, you probably don't know about that scene because ended up on the cutting room floor. Thanks a lot, Obama.

 

 Seriously guys, who farted?

So back in The Cotton Club there’s this little guy played by the dude who played Eddie in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He runs The Cotton Club and is also a talent agent and he is also in an implied gay relationship with the dude who played the judge in My Cousin Vinny. Okay, maybe their relationship wasn't homosexual in nature, but by this point in the film, I was getting kinda bored and was trying to spice it up for myself. Anyway, Eddie from Roger Rabbit thinks Richard Gere is hot and decides to hook him up with a screen test to be in the movies. Gere does the screen test and the movie studio is all like, “Damn, this Richard Gere guy is fuckin’ sexy as hell. And he plays the trumpet cornet like a mofo! But his acting sucks balls. Fuck it – let’s put him in a movie anyway because it’s the early 30’s and most actors of this era are terrible.” So Gere leaves Harlem to star in a movie called The Mob Boss and he comes back every once in a while to bang Diane Lane and watch some tap-dancing at The Cotton Club while Eddie and the judge from My Cousin Vinny take turns tea-bagging each other in the back office.

Eventually Dutch finds out Gere and Diane Lane are slapping the ham together and he’s reasonably pissed off. He whips out his gun right in the middle of the club to shoot Gere, but the tap-dancing half-white-lady-screwing Sandman guy sees this and in mid-dance does this twisty ninja-style spinkick and kicks the gun right out the window. Now this is the only point in this 2 hour 15 minute movie where the tap-dancing storyline and the gangster storyline cross over so I assume that that one ninja kick was the apex of the film.

Then there’s some more singing:

And then I don’t really remember what happens next except that Dutch eventually gets killed by someone and Gere and Lane end up together. Then there’s more singing and tap-dancing:

So here's my verdict: This movie was a sloppy fucking mess. Almost as sloppy as this post about it. There was not nearly enough Cage for my money. And I barely even paid any money to see it...so...like...I want a refund, or whatever. Richard Gere wrote and performed all his own cornet solos which is pretty impressive to nerds on trumpet playing internet message boards, but it’s not nearly enough to save this sprawling urban epic from running complete off the rails within the first 20 minutes.

This whole post and I forgot to make a joke about Richard Gere putting a gerbil in his ass. Regrets....

2 Cageheads out of 5