"Elvis" (2022) - Baz Luhrmann Film Reviews/Discussion!

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by EternalReturn, Feb 14, 2022.

  1. artfromtex

    artfromtex Honky Tonkin' Metal-Head

    Location:
    Fort Worth, TX
    There has been a lot said about the accent Tom Hanks is using.

    It appears that in addition to being an on screen actor, Hanks is also narrating the film as Parker. The ONE thing that Hanks could NOT sound like, was Tom Hanks. His voice is instantly recognizable around the world. He chose to put Parker's ethnicity into the voice. I have no problem with that.
     
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  2. GillyT

    GillyT Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wellies, N.Z
    Looking forward to seeing this well-entrenched myth ^^^ debunked in the upcoming movie. Won't stop idiots from showing up alas and claiming otherwise.

    [​IMG]
     
  3. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Seems like there probably was a way he could try to "not sound like Tom Hanks" without giving the character a heavy accent he didn't actually have. It's like, what if they made Priscilla a blonde in the film? It wouldn't change the story, and it wouldn't make me unable to enjoy the film or be able to evaluate it based on more important criteria, but it would be a little inaccuracy that would bother me.
     
  4. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I think that's one of the main motivations of Baz to make this film, was to make clear that Elvis wasn't somebody appropriating Black culture, but someone who had been steeped in it since he was a kid.
     
  5. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Yep. The spurious racist quotation from Elvis was debunked some 65 years ago, but it still refuses to die. I was doing some reading on Chuck D., and he has in recent years tried to walk things back and claim that he was criticizing Elvis as a symbol more than the man himself... deploring the way Elvis was given credit, acclaim, and riches when black innovators of the time were not. But I suspect Chuck was also misinformed and believed that quotation was genuine, and wrote his lyric based on that, though he doesn't seem to want to admit it now.

    If this film does nothing else besides help deflate the cultural appropriation talk, it will have performed an invaluable service.
     
  6. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    Spot on and highlighted by me for emphasis.
     
  7. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Soundtrack- original Elvis Presley singing .. original music .. or like Backbeat bunch of young musicians recreating the original sound?
     
  8. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Will today’s audience be interested in sixty years old music, icon. Example: The remake WestSideStory was a bit of a flop. Film out in a few weeks.. should do better than WSS I’d imagine.
     
  9. brucewayneofgotham

    brucewayneofgotham Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bunkville
    In 2022 , I think Chuck D would admit , the lyrics , were just "anger" that he was feeling at the time , with the "system" , more then anything else. I anxiously await his Review of the film
     
  10. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    No, I did not see it but I'll look it up.
     
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  11. Alan G.

    Alan G. Forum Resident

    Location:
    NW Montana
    Not to derail the new movie aspect of this thread, I wanted to comment. I was 9 in 1956. I heard and felt the impact Elvis had then, saw him on TV, witnessed the furor. I’ve told my daughter, born in the ‘80s, about the literal explosion he created and she said, “I’ve never witnessed anything like that.”

    From John Floyd’s book, “Sun Records, An Oral History”, I wanted to quote Jim Dickinson, Memphis musician and record producer:

    “I saw Elvis in ‘56, both performances in Memphis, at the Ellis Auditorium and Russwood Park, and anyone who saw Elvis and said said they were inspired to have a career in music is lying, because seeing him was like seeing something that wasn’t human. Nobody in their right mind could look at Elvis Presley and think they could do what he was doing, because it was that strange…Elvis Presley was superhuman. There was something in the way that he walked onstage that was beyond anything you could conceive of ever doing. It was that cool…He just glowed.

    I saw the Beatles on their first tour, I’ve seen The Rolling Stones in all their incarnations, seen Dylan - I never saw anything like Elvis Presley. Just the way he walked on the stage. He didn’t even have to sing. And you lose sight of it in terms of contemporary society, but what he was doing was completely revolutionary and liberating. Just shaking his leg - just the simple act of shaking his f*****g leg - began the whole sexual revolution and changed the way every man on earth walked, talked, and combed his hair. To this day. “

    If the film could capture that, I’ll be happy.
     
  12. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    Here is another quote from a brand new article this morning in the New York Times. I am more impressed with this Austin Butler kid every time I read something new about how he prepared for the role. He also said in another interview that he has never loved someone he's never met more than he loves Elvis. There is a lot of passion coming from this guy. I see why Denzel Washington was so impressed with his work ethic.

    Washington also helped persuade Luhrmann to take a chance on Butler.

    “Denzel Washington called me — I had never met him, didn’t know him at all — and he said, ‘Look, I know you are seeing this young man Austin Butler, and I wanted to tell you that I have just been onstage with him, and I have never seen an actor with a work ethic like him,’” Luhrmann said. Washington declined to comment.

    Butler lived up to Washington’s description, Berman, the producer, said. The actor obsessively researched Elvis, in part by poring through the Graceland archives; worked with a movement coach to learn how to properly swivel his hips (the secret is actually in the knees); listened to the entire Elvis song catalog in chronological order; and covered his apartment walls with Elvis images, quotes and a meticulous chronology of his life. (To relax, he took solo walks on a beach, learned French and took up pottery.)

    “There were times when I was afraid,” Butler said. “Can I even do this? Am I going to fall flat on my face? Be discovered as a fraud? But then I started to kind of get comfortable with the fear, to the point that I could say, ‘I see you, fear, and you’re not going to stop me.
     
  13. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. I know a number of "second generation" Elvis fans, but haven't really had a chance to talk to very many who saw him as he first appeared.
     
  14. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    The reviews on the brand new Elvis biopic are coming in fast and furious from the Cannes Film Festival. They all seem to be overwhelmingly positive from the five or six I've read so far. Austin Butler is universally praised for his charisma and skill at capturing Elvis the artist and vocalist on stage and off. Tom Parker might be the narrator of this film, but he sure does not seem to be the hero he thinks he is as played by Tom Hanks. Here is a quote from the review in Deadline:

    Butler, previously best known in movies for playing Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, is an ideal choice as Presley both visually and vocally, and he actually sings himself in the first half during the early Elvis era (replaced by tracks of the real Elvis in the later years). Perhaps more than anyone who has seriously taken on Elvis, Butler thrillingly succeeds, especially in the film’s first half, with an authentic rhythm that makes us wonder what greater heights Elvis could have climbed had he not succumbed to the dark side of his own fame.

    Hanks goes for it and nails the enigma of Parker, even if for fans his authentic accent may be a bit disconcerting. Hanks dives in, subtly showing us a slippery manipulator whose decisions about Presley’s career might also be connected in part to hiding his own shady past and gambling addictions.
     
  15. Deuce66

    Deuce66 Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    Hollywood Reporter review
    ‘Elvis’ Review: Austin Butler & Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic – The Hollywood Reporter

    How you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

    Variety review
    'Elvis' Review: Austin Butler and Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann's Biopic - Variety

    Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera. Luhrmann, who made that masterpiece of romantically downbeat razzle-dazzle “Moulin Rouge!” (and in 20 years has never come close to matching it), isn’t interested in directing a conventional biography of Elvis. And who would want him to? Luhrmann shoots the works, leaping from high point to high point, trimming away anything too prosaic (Elvis’s entire decade of churning out bland Hollywood musicals flashes by in an eye-blink). He taps into the Elvis of our reveries, searing us with the king’s showbiz heat and spinning his music — and how it was rooted in the genius of Black musical forms — like a mix-master across time.
     
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  16. GillyT

    GillyT Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wellies, N.Z
    The Variety reviewer really gives props to the last Act. I'm guessing it's impact is largely derived from having never been portrayed before on-screen, in a way which humanises Elvis.

    "Yet as “Elvis” dramatizes, Vegas also became Presley’s prison, because Parker nailed him to a merciless contract, and for the most scurrilous of motivations: The Colonel needed Elvis at the International to pay off his own mountainous gambling debts, even if that meant that the singer, offstage (and, ultimately, onstage), became a slurry, pill-popping ghost of himself. Our identification with Elvis only deepens as we realize that he’s “caught in a trap.” The film’s richest irony is that Butler’s performance as the young Elvis (the one who’s far closer to his own age) is an efficient shadow of the real thing, but his performance as the aging, saddened Elvis, who rediscovered success but lost everything, is splendid. He’s alive onstage more than he was doing “Hound Dog,” and offstage, for the first time in the movie, Elvis becomes a wrenching human being. Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained."
    Perfect imperfection. I'm happy with that. Roll on 23 June. ;)
     
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  17. artfromtex

    artfromtex Honky Tonkin' Metal-Head

    Location:
    Fort Worth, TX
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  18. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
  19. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    You know some of us Elvis fanatics wish it were longer, Lol. Seriously, it sounds like about the right length given the complexity of Elvis's career, which Baz himself has pointed out was almost like three separate careers over three distinct decades. Thanks for posting the link again, because I had not noticed the video review by Pete Hammond that is almost ten minutes long and really fascinating. Naturally, Mr. Hammond gets a couple of facts wrong about Elvis, but he really loved the movie, especially Tom Hanks and Austin Butler, but apparently all the side players are great as well. I was intrigued that they actually cover the 70's so well, even the famous on stage rant when Elvis criticizes the Hilton Hotel management for firing his favorite waiter. It eventually led to the famous incident in which Elvis temporarily fired Parker backstage afterwards. I highly recommend viewing the actual video review on the link.
     
  20. EternalReturn

    EternalReturn Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    London UK
    All the press reviews from Cannes are up on Rotten Tomatoes - giving an overall review score of 82% - (link below)
    Elvis
     
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  21. Mr. Siegal

    Mr. Siegal Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sitting on my sofa
  22. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    Looks like a bit of an outlier at this point. Most of the mainstream critical reviews have been unabashedly positive so far.
     
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  23. GillyT

    GillyT Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wellies, N.Z
    The negative reviews tend to originate from critics who have a history of disliking Baz Luhrmann movies period. Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian being a case in point. Loved that Deadline video review. Thanks for pointing it out and Vidiot for posting the link. :edthumbs:
     
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  24. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    One thing that caught my eye in this review is the following sentence:
    "the camera zooms in on Parker’s neck sweat, spins 360 degrees, speed-ramps through several different frame rates, invents six entirely new aspect ratios, and then lands on the prosthetic nose that only skirts anti-Semitism because no one knows for sure if the Colonel was Jewish"

    That's really out of left field. I've never heard anyone suggest the Colonel might be Jewish. Alanna Nash says both his parents were Catholics. Marty Lacker says the Colonel made anti-Semitic comments at times. Now, it's certainly possible the Colonel was a self-hating Jew who practiced Catholicism, but is there any evidence of this, or is the reviewer basing his speculation solely on the fact that the Colonel had a big nose and was interested in money? That seems a pretty simplistic and stereotyped basis upon which to make that assumption, and suggests the reviewer is really bending over backwards to find things to criticize here.
     
  25. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    I am glad you pointed that ridiculous statement about Parker' nose from the reviewer. I could not get pass his disbelief that Elvis might feel particularly terrible about Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination that took place in Elvis's adopted home city of Memphis. I cannot tell you how many people I know or have met from Dallas, Texas that felt particularly awful about John F. Kennedy's assassination in their city so many years ago. There is a real sense of horror when something happens to somebody you admire and respect, but you feel particularly bad about it when it happens in a place that you call home and are normally proud to be from. The writer cannot seem to recognize that Elvis was devastated by Martin Luther King Jr.'s death as so many Americans were that year. Here is the same critics sarcastic take on the events from 1968 with regard to Elvis's perspective and notice how unsympathetic the reviewer is on Elvis's feelings regarding the horrific event.

    That won’t be the last time Luhrmann acknowledges his subject’s oft-discussed role in the history of American race relations — just wait until the feverish sequence where Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is framed as something that personally happened to Elvis Presley, and made him feel very sad — but it’s safe to assume that “Elvis” is less interested in the cultural etymology of Presley’s music than it is in the way that stiff ribbons of jet-black hair falls across Austin Butler’s face every time he sweet talks into a microphone.

    I refused to read the rest of the review after this passage above. As you say so well in your post above, these statements seem to "suggest that the reviewer is really bending over backwards to find things to criticize here," Lol. He appears to have a bit of a beef with Baz or the main subject of the film as @GillyT pointed out in another critical review of the film. So far, these negative reviews seem to be outliers at best.
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2022

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