peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2023 12 15 HeartsOfDarkness

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)

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Second time around, a revisit prompted by Sam Wasson's book. I was a bit less riveted this time: the behind-the-scenes making-of footage remains gripping — Coppola trying to direct Dennis Hopper! Martin Sheen's heart attack! — but I can do without the faux profundity; I'll be giving Eleanor Coppola's Notes a miss now. Also it seems to be wrongly titled for a 1991 assembly: Wasson told me that Coppola's Waterloo was his next movie, One from the Heart, circa 1981. Unlike Burden of Dreams we don't get to see what went so wrong with Harvey Keitel in the lead.

On the plus side it made me want to dig up whatever remains of Orson Welles's efforts on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Janet Maslin.