If I was managing Austin Butler's career, and clearly it is about to explode, I would advise him against any further Elvis projects other than promoting this film in the media. He needs to concentrate on his next project, which hopefully will show his diversity and range as an actor. He was fantastic playing an evil Charles Manson follower in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
If you're in the Kansas City area, next week it will still be in the AMC Prime auditorium at Barrywood 24. This is my favorite image quality of any theater, as good as Dolby Cinema with the addition of bass shakers in each seat.
Oh geez, I forgot to say my lady gave the Elvis film a 9/10 and she is not half the Elvis fan that I am, but she does like him a whole lot.
Put in a good word for me My only question is how to address the His Hand In Mine album in such a hypothetical set. I wouldn’t want religious-themed music to be a turn off to any potential new consumers but I also know there are stunning recordings (performance and engineering) on this album. Maybe a very select handful of cuts.
Travolta jumped from Saturday Night Fever to Grease. AB: Grease remake maybe be a bad career move for the young mr,butler… or
The problem with marketing a Bill Porter set as a movie tie-in is that, in the movie, Elvis loses the plot in the Army in Germany and his entire 1960s output is written off with the two-minute surfboard montage before Elvis gets his mojo back with the ’68 Comeback. I didn’t expect to see Austin Butler lip-syncing “Milky White Way” in the movie, but, unless you assume that the casual fans who saw the movie will buy anything with an “as seen in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis!” sticker slapped on it, I really don’t see how the movie promotes music from a period of Elvis’s career that the movie writes out of the story.
I just wanna know, does the movie answer the question that keeps me up at night? Episode Nothing: Star Wars in the 1970s: Did Elvis Presley see Star Wars?
It in fact does not. There's a clip of the Beatles during the movie years montage, though, so there's that.
I think the new fans will lap up the soundtrack album like gravy, but us long term fans might dig the Porter album and the sticker idea is not a bad one. Your greater point is a good one though. The fact of the matter is that this movie is going to do more to expose Elvis's music to a new generation of fans than anything Sony Music or BMG before them has ever done. One guy said as he walked out of the theater a group of female teenagers were singing. out-loud, "If your looking for trouble..."
I totally agree with you about Hanks' accent. There were a couple of very brief moments where the accent slipped at the end of a word and suddenly I was very aware of Tom Hanks rather than being immersed in the film.
Again, I didn’t expect the movie to take a deep dive into the His Hand in Mine sessions, however, you know, maybe it could have devoted two or three minutes to Elvis singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” from Blue Hawaii and singing “Stuck on You” or “Fame and Fortune” on the Frank Sinatra special, or singing one of the better early 60s songs such as “Return to Sender” or “His Latest Flame” before pivoting to the “and his 1960s sucked” decline narrative. For all the good this movie has done and will do in simply getting Elvis’s name out there before the public again, it also reinforces tired narratives about Elvis’s career that have been floating around since John Lennon argued “Elvis died when he joined the Army.” The Bill Porter recordings from 1960-62 are a powerful argument against that theory, but don’t fit in with Baz’s childlike cartoon narrative for dummies that: 1) Elvis took all of his good musical ideas from black people, 2) For a brief moment circa 1954-56, Elvis’s music was good, 3) But then, from 1960-1967, the evil Snowman turned him into a “family entertainer” and forced him to make a lot of bad movies, 4) Before he sang “I Can Dream” on TV in 1968 and healed a broken nation with the power of his song.
You know I cannot argue with you on a couple of those points, but your number one is a bit of an overstatement. Baz notes he specifically borrowed form country as well with his Hank Snow cover and the melting of several genres on his take of That's All Right. I would have liked to have seen a little more acknowledgement of Elvis's country music roots, but it is there to see if your looking. Again, it is a very small gripe from me. Baz had to shoot down the black appropriation argument so that had to be the center of the beginning of the movie. He left them without any bullets to shoot after showing Elvis at the tent revivals in Tupelo. Baz is one astute guy. He cut Elvis's critics down at the knees and the movie is better off for it. If I Can Dream is one of the most powerful moments in music and television history. I think that song continues to heal people to this fine day.
‘I’m Coming Home’ is used in a nice scene in the movie. It’s gotten a small amount of attention outside of the film proper as Tom Hanks has said it’s now his favorite Elvis song.
When I visited Graceland in November 2010, they were showing that infamous 1977 CBS television special on a monitor in the racquetball court/gold records room.
That was the real revelation for me, Elvis as band leader, putting together an incredibly talented group of top players and singers and then directing them.
From one article I read online, the first few takes in the movie had Butler as Elvis arranging the music, but the band was playing everything perfectly. It didn't seem realistic and not much for Butler to do, so Luhrmann had "Ronnie Tutt" not come in on a part or the bass not play the right pattern at first, without telling Butler. When they came back to try the sequence again, it looked a lot better with Butler being able to walk around and cue musicians, etc.
It's interesting listening to this as I've listened to the "Something For Everybody" version since 1961 and always thought it was the best track on the LP. However, these ovedubs really work well on it, especially the strings. And thankfully it leaves the Nashville A Team's musicianship untouched, especially Hank Garland's fantastic guitar solo. A nice addition to my collection.
