I started to tear up in the theatre seeing it with Butler, being between upset at that's how Elvis was last seen by the world and amazed that it was allowed to be depicted at all. Then it switched to the real Elvis, and it ratcheted up the emotion even more, with my inner Patton screaming, "Luhrmann, you brilliant son of a bitch, you did it! You got them to allow 1977 Elvis to be seen again!"
He did exactly what so many Elvis fans and critics said you could never do, "Under no circumstances do you ever show the overweight and sickly looking Elvis of the late 70's, especially any footage from 1977." Baz does not live by other peoples rules. He makes his own rules, and movie lovers are better off for it. Mr. Luhraman also never underestimated Elvis's true fans, unlike so many other critics have done in the past.
What some fans want is absolutely impossible - a biography of Elvis Presley starring Elvis Presley. Barring the invention of a time machine so we can put a camera operator actually there at the time, we'll never achieve that. Baz Luhrmann managed to find a young actor who (as much as possible) looked like Elvis Presley, sang like Elvis Presley, talked like Elvis Presley and had some portion of the man's super-human charisma. If he's gotten young people to listen to the originals music, he has accomplished a great thing for Elvis's legacy.
Here's hoping! So far, the only thing I've seen on the horizon is a rerelease of the 30 #1 Hits as an "expanded release, which means it includes 2nd to None as the second disc. My hope is that there are some other releases planned in some way, maybe an "Original Versions of songs as heard in Elvis" or something like that, like what was done with Cadillac Records some time ago: a CD was issued as Best of Chess Records: Original Versions of Songs Heard in Cadillac Records". Something beyond the 30 #1s collection to get people in who want to listen to more of his music.
They should re-release a budget version of the Elvis 75: Good Rockin' Tonight box set. They could even do some revisions like replacing Adam and Evil and This Is My Heaven with Cotton Candy Land and Edge Of Reality.
As with Queen’s catalog sales rising after their biopic, it’s hardly surprising that a major biopic of any musical artist would move the needle of catalog sales. As I imagine Col. Parker would say, all publicity is good publicity.
I agree with you 100% on that: he broke a dumb taboo that Elvis’s estate has imposed. But, again, even a brief glimpse of overweight and sickly Elvis from 1977 was instantly more compelling than what we’d seen for the previous two-and-a-half hours, so I’d argue that he undercut his own movie by doing so.
That’s a good question, one I’d have to think about more deeply. As I said above, I would argue that, as we see with the cliché of the Elvis impersonator, it’s impossible to try to re-enact or re-create whatever magic spark it was that Elvis had without lapsing into parody. Would the same be true for a movie about, say, Michael Jackson? Is there any actor who could recapture the spark Jackson had during the Thriller era without lapsing into parody? I haven’t really thought about that, because I don’t really care about Michael Jackson the same way I care about Elvis. As a super-fan of Elvis, I noticed how Baz slavishly re-created certain iconic moments down to the smallest detail: in the original ’68 Comeback audience, for example, there was a beautiful Asian/Pacific Islander girl in the seats gazing longingly up at Elvis, and, you know what, Baz went out and found some modern-day young actress who looks just like her and stuck her in his recreation of that moment. Likewise, some of the That’s The Way It Is-era concert re-enactments in the movie were shot-for-shot re-enactments, down to the use of split-screen and other vintage effects. But I found that this painstaking attention to detail paradoxically took me out of the story on the screen, as it’s impossible to exactly recreate something from 1968 or 1970 in 2022, and I was too hyper-aware of how Luhrmann was trying to do just that. As I said above, I’m not the target audience for this movie. My wife, who isn’t hyper-attuned to the nuances of the details of the ’68 Comeback or ’73 Aloha satellite broadcast sets, was, I assume, able to watch Luhrmann’s recreations of those events without getting bogged down in the uncanny valley fakeness of those recreations that bothered me.
Yeah, I think you're a touch out of control on this in how harsh you're being. Fortunately, the general movie-going public is loving the movie overall, and that means that more people will become Elvis fans because of it, if they haven't started that journey already. Holding Elvis to be a saint and that he needs to have his story told in a sacred way is simply unrealistic. Like I said, the general public and casual Elvis fans don't know about the minutiae, nor do they care. Also, a movie about all that wouldn't make much money or would be that interesting. I'm a huge fan myself, and absolutely loved the movie, with plans to see it a third time this weekend. That will be a real barometer, as I'm taking my mom (who experienced it all firsthand, the rise of Elvis and the backlash).
Who ever argued that Elvis was a saint? I certainly don’t think that. I think he was an immensely talented and flawed human being who deserves better than this cartoon biopic with Evil Tom Hanks made the scapegoat for many of the failings and flaws that the real Elvis actually had. However, the mythic power of the story is strong enough to survive this cartoon retelling of it. And if this cartoon retelling of the story, plus a posthumous duet between Elvis and Doja Cat, is enough to attract new listeners to the music, which, in the end, is all that matters, I’m all for it.
I posted this a while back. It's a fan podcast which I sometimes listen to and enjoy because he has had some fantastic guests on, such as Barbara Hearn, in the past. This episode dropped a few weeks back and featured a review of the film, written by someone who attended one of the Australian preview screenings earlier this month. This person was connected to the film industry and also had connections to former colleagues in the music industry who were there and who he/she spoke to. This person, bound by a confidentiality agreement, shared some very interesting quite specific information, which sounded credible to me, about plans for Elvis' catalogue if the film was to do well. The relevant information starts @ 4:45.
A film intended for the most passionate Elvis fans would not make any money. For one, it is impossible to meet a standard of absolute accuracy, for another, it's just not large enough of a group to make the cost of production back. What Baz and his team had to do was to try to convey to a modern audience what the experience of Elvis Presley was like, and I think he did that wonderfully - and far better than any other director could have.
One question that the film raises is this - would Elvis had had the same success if he had an ethical and moral manager rather than a sociopathic Carnival Huckster? (That view of Parker is not based on the movie, but on listening to a podcast interview by Alana Nash, who pointed out that he was granted an honorable discharge from the Army for being mentally ill with what we would call "antisocial personality disorder", or more commonly, a sociopath.) I think he was so obviously talented that a good manager (for instance, one who only took 20%) would have been able to build as big or bigger a career, would probably still have directed him into movies, but would have allowed him to become a serious actor, and would have had him tour the entire world.
I'd disagree with that. Go on youtube and read the comments of any Elvis video ( and many non Elvis videos) and you won't have to read long before someone pipes in with culture vulture, stole everything he ever did, etc. Now I see lots of pedo posts, too. Even on non Elvis videos, like a Little Richard video it won't be long before someone posts "a real original, not like that culture vulture Elvis". It really feels like a real concerted effort to debase Elvis by somebody.
And yet, as can be seen by many of us passionate Elvis fans in this thread I think it’s safe to say he at least made this film in part for us. All of the attention to the most minute details surely has to be in acknowledgement of that fan base.
Of course any response is conjecture but The Colonel was really only unethical (in some, not all, ways) with Elvis. He didn’t, for example, ‘cheat’ RCA, concert promoters or the movie studios. Kind of ironic when you think about it.
Maybe that’s the case. I don’t listen to Elvis music on YouTube videos - I own the actual records and CDs, so I wouldn’t know what’s going on the YouTube comments. I do think this film itself feeds the notion that, say, Little Richard was the “real deal” and Elvis was merely the white imitator, but that’s the society we live in now and people are going to think what they’re gonna think. As I’ve said a million times before, the glory of 50s rock and roll was the mashing up of “white” and “black” styles, and that was a two-way street: Chuck Berry took as much from “white” music as Elvis did from “black” music, but people are going to say whatever they say about that.
According to some of your comments in this thread, any presentation of Elvis in a film not showcasing the man himself would be a "karaoke/cosplay farce" so your criticisms of the film as a "cartoon biopic" don't make sense. It sounds like any biopic would come off that way to you. Though I will agree with you that is one area where the film is not as good as it could be for me; leaning into more of the issues that Elvis brought to the table would have been welcomed, though I don't think it blames absolutely everything on Tom Parker. But then such a film may have never gotten the green light from the estate; then again, the villanous portrayal of Parker was reportedly softened after Luhrmann got to talk to Priscilla and Jerry Schilling, so who knows? Basically, making a movie about Elvis is difficult.
While I do think you can use the excuse "It was different back then" a bit, I mean, it WAS different especially in the south where early teen marriages were fairly common I can't ever imagine being 24 and attracted to a 14 year old. I have some nieces that are older now but man were they annoying and immature at that age. Even most 18 year olds would have been off limits for me at 24. Throw in looking at it from a 2022 perspective and that's a tough one to get past.
That's a very interesting question and one I can't answer. I think Parker did a lot of good things for Elvis in the 50s and probably up until around 1962. Elvis wanted to be an actor but when he realized that he wasn't getting any good roles he should have quit and focused on the music. Instead he kept signing one movie contract after another which wasn't good for his career, even though most of the movies were quite successful financially. Parker has to take a lot of blame for that. If Elvis had fired Parker in the early 60s, his career may have been different. Better? Who knows...
As we talked about above, I do find the standard musical biopic format inherently flawed, as skewered so perfectly by Walk Hard. Trying to condense an entire human being’s life, and decades of social, cultural, and fashion changes, into two hours plus, inevitably leads to compressions, omissions, distortions, and painful expository dialogue like we see in this film. I continue to think that using the framing device of the Evil Snowman to tell this story was a horrifically bad decision. While I can grasp what Luhrmann was aiming for, as he spoonfed us with Tom Hanks’s monologue - “You and I are two misfit children reaching for eternity, Mr. Presley! We are the same, you and I!” - it just didn’t work for me. Add to that that Hanks’s performance was comically bad, not only because of the awful fake accent, but for other reasons as well, and that Butler’s own “Well, uh, ah jess-uh a-wiggle mah hips, ma’am, and the girls-uh a go-uh crazy” Southern accent was also laughably bad, and, yes, it was a cartoon cosplay farce.
That's my thought, but I guess it shows how naive and ignorant Elvis and Vernon were about finances. First of all, Colonel's bill would have never stood in court. And even if it did it would have taken a long time to settle. Elvis could have made that money up easily just by getting a manager who was only taking 15-20% instead of the Colonel's 50% even without a world tour. Throw that in the mix and that $8 million in the movie ( which I believe in real life was only $2 mil) would have been a minor blip on the radar.
Nice. Thanks for posting. I'm all for whatever they can come up with. I'm skeptical they can continue the path the the soundtrack started. That was sort of a special one off thing. But who knows? We'll see. I'm enjoying the hell out of the soundtrack and Don't Fly Away is my summer jam. If we can get more nuggets like that bring it on.
