i just watched for the first time
The Cotton Club -
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087089/reference
and it's not great. I watched the newly edited, Coppola's director cut, at 2h19min.
Richard Gere stars as Dixie, a musician that by pure coincidence saves the life of "Dutch" Schultz, and becomes entangled into their mob life.
Diane Lane stars as Vera, a young flapper who thinks herself the jaded woman, "ready to do anything for money" and intent on becoming Schultz's girl.
Early in the film the two characters are established and she eventually finds a soft spot in her heart for Dixie, who represents normality and, hopefully, happiness.
... and then, there's a whooooooole lot of garbage that idk why they wrote it in. Mario Puzo was the principal scriptwriter.
As i understand it, the film went into development hell, which doesn' help, but despite that there are some clear faults with the script that are pretty damn easy to point out.
1. there is a subplot about two black tapdancing brothers (segregation, mmk?) that has *zero* relevance to the main plot.
2. there is FAR too much music, up to the point where TCC starts to look like .. a musical. Which it's not. Or, idk, at this point i'm not even sure.
3. characters are badly balanced throughout.
Gere is ok, he plays his part well, but then he disappears offscreen, or in some scenes he is "keeping his head down", which is fine story-wise, but doens't really make for a good protagonist. Bob Oskins as always is brilliant, but rarely on screen, and only interacts with the side characters. James Rimar as Dutch Schultz is terrible, Nicolas Cage (yup) is almost unrecognizable as Dixie's brother, in a decent performance. Fred "Herman Munster" Gwynne is again fantastic, but he's basically just a sidekick to Bob Oskin's character. Even Lawrence Fishburn is in this movie !!
The real star of the show is Diane Lane, in her role as Extremely Beautiful Woman, which she's absolutely brilliant in, but her character is fairly shallow.
Compare this to an *actualy good movie* like Pretty Woman. Once again, Richard Gere woos a beautiful but misguided woman (these uppety women eh?); the film gives these characters room to breath, to expand, so where there is a major character arc, it's made clear it's happening. These two are the central and most important parts of the film and anything else that happens, all the supporting characters and events, are there to change something in the relationship between the two leads, which is THE CORE OF THE FILM.
Cotton Club instead is fucking all over the place. You could easily pick several scenes and praise them individually, but as a whole, it's a mess.
I could go on, but there's no point really. It's not even "almost great", you would need to scrap 70% of the film and rebuild it from the ground up.
My vote:
6/10 - surely there must be better ways to enjoy Diane Lane.