One From the Heart
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Movie Reviews of One From the Heart
Movie Review: GENUINELY MISGUIDED FILM MUSICAL
Summary: 4 Stars
There are so many misfires in "One From The Heart" that one is instantly struck by the incredible thought that Francis Ford Coppola could have produced such a lemon. The music is rich but lacking in one hummable song. The performances by Terri Garr and Frederic Forrest are...well, performances. And despite masterful camera work, gorgeous sets and the technological know-how of a brilliant editor, choreographer and director, the film itself only comes to life in miserable fits and lack luster sparks. This isn't a movie musical that you will always remember. On the contrary - its the one you'd rather forget!TRANSFER: Gorgeous - making one pine away for the fact that nothing else in the production quite lives up to the way things look on the screen. Colors are rich, vibrant and well balanced. Black levels are bang on and there is a remarkable amount of clarity and fine details rendered throughout. Contrast levels are beautifully realized. The audio has been remixed and cleaned up. Superbly remastered sums up the DVD.
EXTRAS: 6 hours of incredible vintage hoopla that is almost worth your money. We get Coppola's extensive video journal of the production as well as his documentation of Zoetrope Studios. Clearly he saw himself as the next David O. Selznick. A pity "One from the Heart" wasn't the next "Gone With The Wind".
BOTTOM LINE: The transfer and the extras are definitely worth your money. The film isn't even worth your time!
Movie Review: Very good for what it is
Summary: 4 Stars
I liked this film. The quality of color on the DVD reminded me of bluray in the fineness of its tones. The transfer is gorgeous. In terms of content, if you're in the smoky mood for a little Tom Waits ambiance with a film to accompany it, you've got your movie. For what it sets out to do, "One From The Heart" is a quality production through and through, a stylized jazz riff of a movie from a good year in cinema, 1982. Appreciate magical realism as opposed to realism and you're bound to get something from the film. It reminded me a little of "Singin' in the Rain" with Fred Astaire, not least because the of the film's near-technicolor dazzle, but also for the dance sequences and song elements that step out of the story's reality and into the surreal, aided and abetted of course by Coppola's Zoetrope Studios and fine editing and camera-work. Don't come expecting the latest Hollywood blockbuster or anything in the nature of Godfather or Apocalypse Now, but if you're up for the traditional confines of a love story set in Las Vegas with a soundtrack to match, you may find "One From The Heart" a pleasant enough ride for what it does offer. No regrets here.
Movie Review: Some things take time to grow on you.
Summary: 4 Stars
Sure, ONE FROM THE HEART basically has little more than atmosphere for a story-line, but so what? It's meant to be a confection, Coppola's homage to the old-style silver screen musicals which pulled out every cinematic stop they could to draw you in and win you over. ONE FROM THE HEART doesn't quite rise to the best of that genre (FOOTLIGHT PARADE, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN), but it certainly holds it's own with Martin Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK and Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ, other films that are as much about the "magic" of film as they are about entertainment. Plus, hey, it's a sappy love story; if that's not your idea of a good evening at the movies, fair enough, but you'll rarely see a sappy love story told with so much class. Tom Waits' songs are the glue holding ONE FROM THE HEART together and his duets with Crystal Gayle are sublime.As others have mentioned, Baz Luhrmann borrowed more than a little from ONE FROM THE HEART when he made MOULIN ROUGE. Suffice it to say, then, that if you liked MOULIN ROUGE, the chances you'll like the movie that influenced it at least as much, if not more.
Movie Review: Definitely better than critics' convention wisdom
Summary: 4 Stars
I just saw this at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, where probably the worst dog of a movie would seem great, but this was very enjoyable. I loved this movie when it came out in 1982 or thereabouts and could never figure out why critics blasted it so unfairly. Coppola had worked himself into a persona non grata in Hollywood; the critics were mouthing that hatred--that's all I could figure. Seeing it now, this would probably fall into the "art film" category, but it features some great dialogue and compelling performances by Forrest and Garr, with Raul Julia and Natassja Kinski playing more ethereal roles. Kinski is filmed beautifully. It's a beautiful film, period. The music and Vegas sets are wonderful. You miss it as soon as it's over.
Rich and visually exciting...perhaps not 5 stars, but then again this film just doesn't conform easily to any rating system.
Movie Review: One from the Heart of Darkness
Summary: 3 Stars
A huge roll of the dice that wiped out Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio and saw him spending the next decade churning out pictures to pay off the debts the $28m flop left him with, One From the Heart is one of those films I really want to like - to love, even - but which just won't let me. Visually it's a triumph, but the Tom Waits suicide blues score rarely works as a screen musical and as a human drama its kept firmly on the ground by the fact these characters just aren't likeable. Coppola seems more interested in his lavish studio settings than what's happening in them, with even the most mundane sequences shot like an imaginatively staged theatrical musical with intricate shifts of lighting and colour, dissolving walls and neon dreams. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that Coppola doesn't seem to have made this film for the audience but for himself, and so it probably never connects with anyone not on his personal wavelength. The trailers give away a big part of the problem: the 1982 release stresses the Godfather and Apocalypse Now as evidence of Coppola's genius while the 2003 reissue trailer runs off a list of critical superlatives in a sternly unemotional voice: joy isn't on the menu here.
That the story is so simple as to be almost invisible - a couple split up over the 4th July weekend and become involved with new partners - needn't be a problem: after all, three sailors on furlough looking for Miss Turnstiles or a backwoodsman convincing his six bachelors to kidnap six local girls to marry aren't exactly complex. With good casting, good writing and good musical numbers, there's no real reason it shouldn't work. Unfortunately it doesn't get them. The argument that kicks off the split is atrociously written and just as badly acted - you've seen more vicious spats on The Dick Van Dyke Show - and because we never buy it for a moment the film is handicapped almost from the start. The fact that either lead can carry a movie, is even more of a problem, leaving you with a film without any heart at its center: Raul Julia is the only member of the cast who really shines, and he probably has the least screen time of anyone in the picture. The constant crosscutting doesn't help, with Coppola cutting away as soon as one scene starts to gel to focus on an awkward one that never does. Despite input from Gene Kelly (barely noticeable) and Michael Powell (visually very noticeable), it's not even quite a musical - aside from a couple of fantasy numbers it opts Yentl-like to keep the singing as an invisible chorus/underscore not so much commenting as setting the melancholy tone that counterpoints the bright, garish visuals. The film's one promising musical number, where Julia's serenade of Teri Garr spills out onto the streets of Las Vegas, is never allowed to play uninterrupted without meandering shots of Frederic Forrest wandering through the neon streets.
Coppola's 2003 re-edit of the film does nothing to improve matters. The revised opening is a little smoother but at the expense of Forrest's character, removing all remaining traces of color to make him even more of a boring homebody. It's an excellent DVD, however, with everything you could want to know and more and offering some fairly frank insights into the failure of Coppola's attempt to ally the expertise of the old studio contract system with the modern advances of electronic cinema, not to mention the constant financing problems. It's just a shame that the film itself is so damn hard to love.