Word: cottons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...movies, the gamble was partly economic, but not primarily so. In fact, at a time when the merely average movie, nowhere near as long (2 hr. 43 min.), complex or striking to look at, costs about $11 million, and in a year when competing pictures like Dune and The Cotton Club ran up tabs in the $50 million range, Passage, at around $16 million, seems like a bargain. Its budget is a tribute to an ascetic director's waste-not-want-not ability to visualize precisely what he wants on paper, then put it on film efficiently and economically...
...Cotton Club" really was a Harlem nightclub that popped up during the prohibition era. This infamous speakeasy partied socialites, mobsters and movie stars; gang wars were Hemingway's "lost generation" found themselves in the tunes of performers like Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson...
...surprisingly, "The Cotton Club" rambles along these storylines and several others while consistently failing to reach any dramatic climax, development or even coherence Coppola never investigates the dynamics of the gangsters world, even though "the power" changes hands several times during the film. Coppola presents the titillating moments of mob murders, like when Dixie and Vera watch the impulsive Dutchman stab his rival Flynn with a turkey carver during dinner. The blood sprays the walls, and covers the ivory tablecloth, while drops fall from the chandelier onto Lane's porcelian cheeks. Although scenes like these have dramatic bang, they never...
There is no sense of continuity in the "Cotton Club"; we never know how one gang accumulates or loses it's power. Coppola introduces the Irish Jewish and Italian rackets, but the only way one can tell the mob has changed hands is by the size of gangsters noses...
Coppola would have been better off if he had bagged his screenplay, taken a small table at the Cotton Club, and let the magic work for itself...