You have a much better memory than mine Steve. I don't remember it unfortunately. However I did post on this subject last month on the 'What 3 musical Artists Do You Miss The Most' thread in response to someone who compared Elvis in his latter years to Mr Creosote from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life! Articles like the one you posted are proof positive that this film is changing the narrative on Elvis at long, bloody last. I've always believed that if you let people see Elvis as well as hear him, he does the rest all by himself of pulling an audience in, because that's what happened to me and I'm guessing all of us here, who were born long after his heyday. I've said it before, but I was trying to be a (not very convincing) snotty teenage punk, when Elvis waltzed across the TV screen in his black leather and floored me, because his performance looked and sounded so utterly contemporary. I read a post today on an Elvis site by a high school teacher, who said he walked past a group of teenage girls singing "If you're looking for trouble..." Willie Dixon was right - the little girls understand.
That is almost the exact quote I thought Gilly said or referred to in one of her posts. It is such a sad commentary on some men's very narrow minded view of Elvis's talent and his vulnerabilities as a human being. As one famous General once said to a U.S. Senator about his own past mistakes, "No one has a lock on virtue, not even you, Senator!" Some Elvis fans can be a little too self righteous when reviewing certain aspects of Elvis's less than superhuman moments or when he was outright down and depressed.
Yes, that 17 movie collection is standard DVD. It's the 75th anniversary (really birthday) set WB released in 2010.
Thanks for posting. I usually enjoy reading essays from the New Yorker. However... Young Elvis, for instance, peering through a crack in a shack, spies a couple of dancers, writhing and perspiring to the lusty wail of the blues; he then runs to a nearby tent, sneaks inside, and enters a Black revivalist meeting, which gives him the Pentecostal shakes. The proximity of the two locations is frankly ludicrous, but it allows Luhrmann to hammer home his point: the Presley sound was forged in a double ardor, sacred and profane. You don’t say. ...it's tone is snide. It's glib. Elvis was from "lowly stock"? FFS. Is this the 1940s? How facetious. He says it nice though...
It is good but I prefer when they use lesser known songs. Any Day Now certainly qualifies but SM stands on it's own and doesn't need any redoing. I really liked ALLC and Rubberneckin' remixes
I saw this film today with a group of people . Everyone loved it .Really well done .I’ll be seeing it again -so much there to take in in one sitting!
He was in the US for quite a while, it makes perfect sense he would lose the accent. People from the South who move North often lose their drawl and just the same people from the North who move South will take on the drawl ove rtime. I like the idea that someone posted that this was Parker reminiscing on his death bed so he had no need for the fake accent anymore and could speak in his real voice with the Dutch accent.
Younger people listen to lots of older music, but let's face it, Elvis wasn't considered cool. Jerry Lee was cool, Little Richard was cool, Johnny Cash was cool, Sinatra was cool, but Elvis? Nah. And maybe this film will make them realize Elvis was actually the coolest of them all.
Absolutely. It's all about getting views, in this case from Elvis fans. I doubt many black people are watching those
I’m making broad generalizations here but in your list I think only Cash was perceived as ‘cool’ post 1990, and only due to the American recordings (and then later the film). I was a fan since I was a kid back in the 1970’s - trust me, it was not cool to like him till 1994 or so. But yes, Elvis was the coolest of them all
I agree with that article. I can't think of another Rock star who had drug problems who took the abuse Elvis did. Some of it was because of his sex symbol image and losing his looks somewhat hurt him more than Johnny Cash or Hendrix or whoever. You don't see Jim Morrison taking the abuse Elvis gets. He had real physical issues besides the drugs too. Had he tried to move away from the sex symbol image in 75 or so and dropped the jumpsuits, etc maybe that would have helped some but the vitriol of how he died is just vicious.
I feel like this movie, in a good way, at times, has a combo vibe of Elvis 1979 (Kurt Russell) and This Is Elvis 1981
I'm talking right up to present day. I agree, Johnny probably wasn't seen as cool until the movie and those last recordings. I know I didn't see him as cool, he was just another country singer, which I didn't like at the time. Sinatra was not scorned like Elvis was. I'm not saying kids listened to him much but I'd say they respected him. But right up until this movie (hopefully changes things) Elvis hasn't been cool since 1970 or so.
Yeah, I have to say that Butler is so good, I stopped thinking of him as an actor 15 minutes into the picture and just accepted him as the real Elvis. And that's a helluva thing to do. They particularly got his look perfectly right in the scenes from 1968 on. That might have been the one in which this trend started, since What's Love Got to Do with It was done way back in 1993. I'd agree with that. But I really disliked the rap/hip-hop tunes in the film, including the end credits. I think they were trying way, way, way too hard to embrace younger viewers. I wouldn't mind them releasing a separate album of hip-hop covers & remixes of classic Elvis tunes; I just don't want to hear them in the movie. Pulls me right out of the 1950s/1960s period.
No on Tv, whatever. Someone posted it will be dated in 20 years, If it's still in circulation in any way in 10 that would be amazing to me.
"Craw-Fever" is without a doubt one of the top two or three highlights of a soundtrack that is a lot better than I imagined it would be.
The Doors was 1991 so I'd go with Ray in 2004 as starting the trend. Before the Doors you gotta go back, I think, to Patsy Cline Sweet Dreams in 85 and back to Coal Miner's Daughter for Loretta Lynn in 80 and The Buddy Holly Story in 78 for theatrical ones
Just got back from seeing this with my wife, and, while she liked it, I thought it was awful, and Tom Hanks’s performance was one of the worst in the history of cinema. Further, the shoehorning of the entire life story of Elvis into Good Elvis vs. Bad Manager was reductive and simplistic, and, once we’ve made the point that Col. Parker is a Snowman, and bad, and awful, do we have to keep dwelling on it over and over again? It’s as if someone made a biopic of Led Zeppelin and half of the screen time was devoted to Peter Grant. I don’t want to see the artist’s manager, I want to see the artist. From the opening minutes, we’re in biopic hell, where clunky expository dialogue spoon feeds us Luhrman’s rock history 101 narrative: “What’s that record you’re listening to, Little Jimmie Rodgers Snow?” “Why, it’s a new record on Sam Phillips’s Sun label, out of Memphis. You know, he makes those race records!” “But this one has a country beat!” Barf. Cut to the obligatory television broadcasts of MLK and RFK getting gunned down … “Doctuh King was going to change society! And make it better!” Dear God, please make biopic history lessons stop. When the nameless girlfriend (Dixie?) in one early scene said, “Elvis, you’ve upset your mother!” a few people in the audience laughed out loud, the dialogue was so clunky and expository. I found it ironic that the opening number in the montage devoted to how awful the 60s movies were was … “A Little Less Conversation,” one of Elvis’s best songs and performances of any era, from one of his more interesting movies, that, whether it was a total success or not, at least messed with the girls in bikinis formula of the mid-60s in some fairly interesting ways. Some of the “factual” assertions in the film were false, I suspect: was Gladys ever really backstage at the Hayride? If she actually went on the road with Elvis in 1954, I was unaware of that. Likewise, the script seemed to make a big deal about Elvis being given a choice between the army and jail, which struck me as very dubious. As the B.B. King character accurately argued, Elvis was never going to get put in jail, and I highly doubt whoever it was at the draft board who made the decision to draft Elvis was coordinating with the police who were otherwise supposedly going to arrest Elvis. I thought Austin Butler did the best he could, but everyone who tries to play Elvis ends up being reduced to an Elvis impersonator, and this was really driven home at the very end of the film, where we cut to footage of the real Elvis giving the Jaycees speech and singing “Unchained Melody,” etc. Those 30 or 45 seconds of the real Elvis were more interesting than everything that preceded them for the previous two-and-a-half-hours. If this film accomplishes anything, I would applaud it for breaking the the taboo against showing footage of the 1977 TV special in public, because, as I’ve long said, even at the sad, bitter end, Elvis still had that magic spark that can’t be explained. Visually the movie was interesting, and, if the screenplay had been better, this could have been worthwhile. The soundtrack was horrific: Luhrman’s go-to idea of stripping away all of the instruments and turning every song into an a cappella dirge wears thin real quick, and the less said about the addition of “modern” electric guitars and guest rappers to the songs, the better.
