One from the Heart (2024)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Coppola's follow-up to Apocalypse Now and his first film at his newly developed American Zoetrope studio, this was supposed to procure his everlasting success as a great American auteur (it probably wasn't even in doubt at the time). Unfortunately, the film turned out to be a huge money pit, was poorly reviewed and did poorly at the box office. Pretty much every film Coppola made afterward was to pay off debts due to this movie. That history weighs heavily on the film, but, really, it's quite lovely. Not a masterpiece, but it's quite lovable. Frederic Forrest and Terri Garr star as a couple in Las Vegas. They get in a fight, break up, find new lovers (Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski), but still have a connection. It's a very simple story, and honestly a pretty thin one, but it's a charming little romance. What makes the film memorable, though, is the gorgeous production design - Las Vegas re-created in a studio setting. It's very artificial and very eye-popping. The other notable element is the song score, written by Tom Waits. The film is a true treat for Waits fans, who got an Oscar nomination for it (I can't imagine what he possibly lost to!).

Those new wave filmmakers who revolutionised Hollywood during the 1970s were among the first generation of film geeks – people who got into the movies because they loved being at the movies. That's why, when people like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola started getting the cash and influence together to fund their own personal projects in the 1980s, they were liable to blow inordinate sums of money on homages to the cinema they had grown up on. It's odd, because these new wave directors and their work were in many ways the antithesis of classic Hollywood and its ways of doing things.In One for the Heart, writer-producer-director Coppola attempts homage to 1950s musicals like Singin' in the Rain and Guys and Dolls, swing-time romances in which city streets would be recreated in studios for that glitzily artificial look. However, rather than commission a score for the characters to sing, Coppola follows the trend of more recent Bob Fosse musicals, and One from the Heart's numbers are a non-diagetic commentary on the action. This is not a bad idea in itself, except that the music here is especially unmemorable and lacklustre. The songs sound like the end of a bad night out, with Tom Waits voice like the drawl of some predatory sex pest. This is not stuff you'll be singing on the way home.As a director Coppola seems to have mistaken the exaggerated look of the picture's influences for one of bluntness. Often the sets are drenched in coloured lighting, which sometimes changes within the shot, seemingly to highlight contrasts between the two leads and their environments. This and things like having the camera impossibly far back from the leads at their end of their first scene simply look obvious and overdone. On the other hand Coppola does at least display some musical sensitivity (as he did in the more conventional and very good Finian's Rainbow from 1968). The peak of the picture is during the extended music and dance sequence in the middle, in which Coppola shows incredible detail in the handling of the crowd, flashing various extras across the foreground in complement to the score.But there is little else one can say in One for the Heart's favour. The acting performances are mostly dull, and whenever they do broaden out a bit they verge on the silly. The story is hardly inspiring, and we never really sympathise with the characters because they are not made especially likable in the first place. The dialogue is lousy. Coppola had a great idea, but he did not follow it up with one single thought, and the picture works neither as a classic-style homage nor as an updated take on the genre. The musicals of old had a fairytale quality to them. This modern romantic drama, with its swearing, nudity and blazing rows, is mixed with the fake sets and ensemble dance routines like some bizarre and botched Frankenstein's monster. Coppola would now spend years trying to pay off his debts with routine features, and still has yet to rediscover the cinematic gold he struck in the 1970s, with which he had made his name and fortune.

It's popular not to like Coppola after Apocalypse Now. Everyone claiming that the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now are brilliant, yet everything else is "An example of an egomaniac not having objectivity." I've read a lot of reviews and this is all that I've read as the complaints for his later stuff. Sure the negative reviews focus on how thin the characters are thin, and the plot covers a short span of time. But honestly it's a Fairy Tale, and fairy tales have simple plots and thin characters. These same people would praise films like the Princes Bride, or Beauty & the Beast, but not One From the Heart. And why?Because One From the heart has amazing music, from Tom Waits that almost makes it worth seeing just for that. The movie is a musical, which is gutsy for anyone to write a new musical, but the lighting technical achievement is incredible. The film has what I would call "Color Scenes," where each scene is lighted heavily with certain colors, which play into the emotion of the scene. The film is an amazing achievement, for the visuals and the music, which is what it sought after to achieve. Ignore the negative reviews about what a disappointment it is, because the people who write those reviews don't have their own opinion, it's nothing but people repeating the Coppola myth of losing his touch. All he lost was the studio support. And because he focuses on perfecting his art and not making millions of dollars. Great Film, go see it, if you like good movies and don't get doped by the fake critics who talk from a lens that says "this movie is suppose to be bad."

My main problem with this film is that I found neither of the main characters to be remotely sympathetic. Pathetic, yes; sympathetic, not at all. Both are liars and cheats and seemingly have no real pride in themselves or what they want. In short, I was anxious for the film to be over pretty much right from the beginning. The fact that this disastrous, dysfunctional couple gets back together at the end is both predictable and infuriating. Garr's character, for all her insistence that "this is the end", finally breaks down to the cliché "love conquers all" BS that this movie attempts to foist on the viewer. Just awful. Visually, there are some interesting techniques used, not to mention some genuinely beautiful shots, but that wasn't enough to overcome my disappointment. However, the only truly redeeming aspect of this flick is Waits' soundtrack. It's the only thing that got me to sit through the entire thing. After all, T.W. can do no wrong.