In a review of the sequel to Get Shorty, Kurt Loder says the “only really interesting thing about this boneheaded film version of Elmore Leonard’s 1999 best-seller is how flagrantly it trashes the book, and its resultantly flamboyant incoherence.”
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness inspired Coppola’s outstanding Apocalypse Now, but it nearly spawned another adaptation years earlier. For his first film, the great Orson Welles “envisaged Heart of Darkness as an antifascist allegory, in which the looming threat to world peace from Europe’s rightwing dictators was personified in the character of Kurtz.”
An article predicting the contenders for next year’s Oscars mentions five adapatations slated to appear this year: Memoirs of a Geisha, War of the Worlds, All the King’s Men, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Oliver Twist.
