Elvis Presley biopic gets release date, preview

Just a little bit of news about Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic, now given a release date of June 24, 2022:

Elvis movie trailer: Baz Luhrmann gives first look at Austin Butler and Tom Hanks – WATCH

Looks like we're getting all three decades represented here. I'm excited, even if it sucks, honestly

 

Great choice of song for the teaser. I think this could be good (saying this as a fan of Luhrmann's early films, and knowing some of the creative choices will ruffle feathers)

 

My boy, my boy.

 

There has yet to be a person who could portray Elvis and give even a hint as to his real charisma and talent. Even as a fan watching some of these movies I can see where people would see them and think "what was so great about that guy?"
It's the same reason impersonators don't work. Some have real talent, look good, have all the moves but...it's just not Elvis

 

You always seem to have the guys that look the part, and the guys that sound the part, and they're never the same guy. Why it tends to work better in film where the guy that looks the part doesn't have to sound the part.

 

Kurt Russell gave it a good go some years ago on TV.

 

Not really, I just saw a clip from the movie and he had the exaggerated accent and stutter, it was caricature at it's finest.

 

And it will.

 

It was. But, at least Russell was extremely likable and had a commanding screen presence.

 

Are they going for one of those conventional music biopics where they squeeze the singer’s entire life in a two-hour movie? Because those always suck, as they become a compilation of « greatest hits » from the person’s life, with no insight or depth. The way to do it is focus on one part, or just a few moments, of the person’s life.

 

Anything Tom Hanks is associated with always has tremendous promise.
Personally, I've been waiting to see this for what seems like years now....
Oh wait! It has!

 

The thing that's most exciting about this is it doesn't try to tell Elvis's story in a vacuum. For instance, the British singer Yola is playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis's favorite singer (and as far as I'm concerned, the woman who invented rock and roll guitar.)

 

Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker? Shouldn’t they have gotten an actor from the Netherlands?

 

If it’s anything like Baz Luhrmann’s other films, it will probably be a fever dream that jumps through the story of Elvis’s life with no rhyme or reason. Which might be the only way to do justice to it.

 

I don't know if I've ever seen any footage of Colonel Parker. Did he have a pronounced accent?

You cast Tom Hanks when you need star power, but more importantly you cast him when you need somebody who's essentially likable. The movie Castaway wouldn't have worked if you didn't care about the guy stuck on the desert island. Even in the movie where he played a hitman, The Road to Perdition, you basically empathized with the guy, thinking "Well, he's just a guy who has a job that he has to do."

So we have to understand why Elvis trusted this guy, why he went along with Colonel Parker's bad and selfish decisions. And casting someone as essentially decent and likable as Tom Hanks is an easy way to accomplish that.

 

It's well disguised, if it's there.

From 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cnoU602epQ

 

Yeah I was listening for any Dutch accent, and didn't hear anything.

 

I don't think that's really a fair summary of Baz Luhrmann’s career. He hasn't directed that many movies:

1. Strictly Ballroom
2. Romeo + Juliet
3. Moulin Rouge
4. Australia
5. The Great Gatsby

That's it!

Strictly Ballroom had a pretty straightforward story about ballroom dancing, Romeo + Juliet, for all the crap people give it, didn't change one word of Shakespeare's text (I heard an interview with a Shakespeare scholar who praised it as the best modern adaptation).

Moulin Rouge is the one that could be most fairly described as a "fever dream" but honestly, once you've get past the first 15 minutes (which Baz himself said was deliberately designed to scare away people who wouldn't enjoy it) it settles down to a relatively straightforward romance.

I've only seen Australia once, quite a while ago, but again I remember it is a fairly straightforward narrative. The Great Gatsby, again I'll confess I've only seen it the once when it was in the theater, but except for the fact that it used modern music, it was a relatively straightforward telling of the story that I remember reading in high school.

He's never done a biographical picture, and I'll be interested in seeing what he does. I suspect it'll be a lot closer to Australia than to Moulin Rouge.

I think what Baz will be doing is to place Elvis in historical context of the musicians and singers he admired and emulated who've been left out of most of the tellings of his story.

Just look at the cast list, and you'll see names like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, BB King, Jimmy Rogers.

He could tell a completely fascinating story that ends with Elvis on the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show.

 

Luhrmann's last project in 2016 was to a certain extent a music biopic. It was a Netflix musical drama series called The Get Down - about the birth of hip-hop in New York in the late 70's:


If the Elvis film is presented in this style, it will probably be pretty good. Apparently the premise of Luhrmann's film is about the birth of rock 'n roll, cultural changes in the 50's & 60's and the struggle between art & commerce (Elvis & The Colonel).
Filmmaker Baz Luhrmann on Australia being the new Hollywood and how Elvis has brought him to the Gold Coast as makes The King