The Cotton Club - "Cornet Solos by Richard Gere"

You know what's awesome? Nostalgia.

Not actual nostalgia, mind you, which can be pretty debilitating at times. Movie nostalgia, on the other hand - especially for periods that you didn't even live through, is pretty amazing.

Enter The Cotton Club. For a guy for whom jazz played such a role in high school, this movie would be worth watching for the primary setting (the legendary eponymous Harlem jazz club) and the soundtrack alone.

I'm not a particular fan of Richard Gere in general, or Richard Gere in this movie specifically (playing "Dixie" Dwyer - jazz cornet/piano player) - I don't really buy his half-indistinguishable generally-old-timey-New-York-Gangster accent, or any expression that he pulls other than "smug."

But Gere aside, the tone and feel of the movie is thoroughly enjoyable.

Nic Cage and a thoroughly jazz-musicianed-up Richard Gere

There are some fairly ridiculous scenes in the movie, though. IMDB says that the movie is the only one of Francis Ford Coppola to ever receive a Razzie, and I don't have a huge amount of difficulty believing it.

Maybe it's just because I didn't live in the 1928 Harlem Jazz/bootlegger/mob scene, but the scene where Gere and Diane Lane are repeatedly slapping each other and fighting on the dance floor, then the rest of the dancers treat it like the start of a trend, and then the two of them go back to Dwyer's mom's place and knock boots just doesn't quite ring true for me.

Like I said, though - who knows, maybe it happened all the time, and I just don't know it.

Anyway, that scene (and a couple of others like it) aside, it's still a fairly enjoyable mob movie, and as the credits say, it features cornet solos by Gere himself. I haven't found anything that contradicts that, so I'm willing to believe it - they sound good, too.

Cage plays Vincent Dwyer, Dixie's big brother, who has quite a minor role in the whole show, despite being the one who gets Dixie dragged into the mob scene in the first place, only to become the "Mad Dog Mick" who makes enemies of just about every mob boss in New York.

What does Nic Cage look like when he's the most hated man in the New York underground? This.

Bob Hoskins is in it - as club owner/mob boss Owney Madden, Gregory Hines is in it - as tap dancing hero Sandman Williams, Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster and the judge in My Cousin Vinnie) is in it - as Frenchie Demange, Madden's right-hand man, Larry Fishburn plays a black mob boss, Tom Waits plays some random guy and some random guy does a shockingly good Cab Calloway.

The Bob Hoskin-Fred Gwynne dynamic may just be the best part of the whole movie, actually.

If you like mob movies, and you like Nic Cage, you should think about seeing this.

Just for kicks, I've started making movie barcodes (inspired by this awesome stuff) and will cap each post with the visual summary of its movie.

So here, without further ado, every 90th frame of The Cotton Club, shrunk to one pixel wide and stitched together!