Elvis Presley: Classic Or Dud?

I mean if the Colonel really spoke with an accent like that he'd have been deported before he even met Elvis, but on the whole the film was fun and kinetic and captured a lot of Elvisness

Ha, exactly.

yeah i agree

i dont even have much of a problem with what hanks did as parker - like it’s too broad for sure but the irl parker was only slightly less broad imo lol

my main gripe such as it is is that E gets off too lightly given that he was violent w almost every woman in his life incl priscilla but i expected as much since the estate is involved

but overall i am super impressed by the story they’ve told here & butler’s perf is insanely legit

Also the film focuses on Elvis's rocking uptempo material and downplays his balladry (iirc). So there's a lot about his black music influences, but nothing about, say, his deep respect for the stylings of Dean Martin. But I was fine with that. It's a feature length film, not a miniseries, and you have to make choices like that.

yeah there’s nerdy shit i wish was included, like how DJ Fontana used to play strip joints & worked up the beats that Elvis could time his wiggles to

or how much he liked talking abt music w musicians

or that Streisand opened his first Vegas show, or that Tom Jones used to hang out w him in Vegas

i lost it when they cut to the irl footage at the very end though. that rapid city (?) footage fucks me up, hell anything from those shows tbh

Other than Butler's performance in every respect and his set pieces, I don't know what to think. Some of the montages make such strange connections that I laughed out loud at their offense. But!

the performance scenes are what stick with me the most. whatever story Luhrmann was trying to tell about Elvis and the Colonel, or whatever points he hoped to make about Elvis's sincere engagement with Black musical culture, the movie's most compelling achievement is cutting through all the impersonators and Elvis jokes and Weekly World News updates i grew up with, and restoring to Elvis his life as a performer. every one of those live show scenes was electric, barnstorming, fire.

i am curious about the story that Luhrmann possibly ~wanted~ to tell vs the story he was permitted to tell by the estate — or if the estate was always involved from the getgo

i also think it’s funny that Parker’s line in the movie is like oh no I didnt kill him - you all killed him

but the Snowman stuff was good to see included because it helps (i think) kill the idea that Elvis was an unwilling participant in his own career, that he didn’t know Parker’s angle & was fully aware of the many snowjobs (to a degree)

All right, fine, I'm watching it. Thoughts on Substack later this week.

Doctor Casino otm.

yeah def agree, could watch a whole movie just of butler recreating vegas shows

otm, that Vegas sequence was so killer. And the actor playing Ronnie Tutt, Alex Knight, had those moves DOWN. Either Alex is a drummer, or he studied like hell for that role.

(Also, the drum hardware was period-correct. An insanely minor point, yes, but nothing takes me out of a music biopic faster than seeing gear that didn't yet exist.)

The beginning of Death on the Nile where she walks into the club using a wireless guitar transmitter in 1937,smh.

LIttle Egypt?

Who was also on Star Trek: TOS.

Yeah, they didnt miss a note with the 1968 special and Vegas stuff. I wonder if it's even possible to play "CC Rider" in a film without a split screen montage of traffic and showgoers all speeded up.

THAT SAID, what's the point of devoting so much time to how faithfully a film recreated something? Everyone raved about how spot-on the Queen movie re-did Live Aid, and I thought, "How bout I just stay home and watch THAT on Youtube then?"

I kinda went Wow at the detail down to the Coca-Cola wax-paper cups during "Unchained Melody," but then when they switched to "The Real Thing" (swidt?), I figured they might as well have just gone with that version the whole time. Except I guess it was the final layer of the movie getting peeled back to reveal its subject.

I enjoyed the movie for what it was, and I enjoyed watching the 1968 special from inside the studio itself, I guess. There was no way I was going to go with my Dad, who grew up in the Lauderdale Apartments and would've been going THAT'S NOT THE WAY IT IS. (swidta?)

For me it's not so much that the performances are recreated, altho I do also love period details for their own sake. But I'm just impressed with how the magic of movies gives the performances this fullness and saturation and emotional conviction that would be hard to get without attending the concert in person (and even then...?). Editing, closeups, little flourishes (the tiny shakes to the camera when Elvis leans in close to one of the other musicians and waves his hand to emphasize the beat)... Lots of ways that someone like Baz, who has no fear of going too cheesy or too maximalist, can try and make the whole theater seem to pulse when Elvis takes the stage.

Obviously these are things lots of filmmakers have weighed, both for fiction films and concert docs. And fair, Luhrmann takes a VERY specific approach here; I can accept that it's not gonna work for everyone!

I think maybe I have a Robert Mitchum level love/hate relationship with film fetishistic attention to period detail but in this case it worked for me because it was keyed in with the performance, otherwise there would have been some uncanny valley narcissism of small differences to really bug me.

Also, rare is the film that feels like an ILM thread, but I would totally buy this whole enterprise beginning as an impassioned, multi-paragraph, second or third response to a 2002-era thread entitled, "Elvis Presleys's 'Vegas' period: rock 'n' roll gold, or gold-plated toilet?"

complete with forehead-slapping typo to annoy posters for the next 2+ decades

Lolll!

*karate punch*

Chang-Chang-a-chang-chang

Lord have mercy

(Bassline on standard live version of “Polk Salad Annie” is insane, so rubbery)

Thank you

(Bass is Funhouse-level driving)

recreating Vegas is kind of a feat in itself since there’s a lot of audio but not a huge amount of footage or photos to use as reference material so it’s quite a feat to recreate something like that that ~feels~ faithful

i fucking LOVE that gold curtain

although I don't believe for a second the Colonel didn't know what Elvis was going to perform in the TV special ahead of time

yeah I think that was all horseshit for drama, along with Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in the middle of the special (he was killed months earlier).

Tommy Lee Jones stole the film imo

what now

They actually did tape the TV special in June 1968, but taping commenced a couple of weeks after the RFK assassination. Close, but still fiction.

yeah I think that was all horseshit for drama, along with Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in the middle of the special (he was killed months earlier).

― akm, Monday, September 5, 2022 12:22 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's true that Parker being unaware of what Elvis would perform is simply not believable. However, Elvis began rehearsals for the special on June 3 (filming started on June 20), and Kennedy was shot on June 6.

ah ha, good to know.

This week I found out the laughing version of Are You Lonesome Tonight was a UK hit. Which makes it one of two UK hits I'm aware of which are basically just laughing (Winx's Don't Laugh is the altogether very different other example).

It’s a mighty big stage. You could get lost in a place like this.

I think I've heard the laughing version of that song exactly once but the line "do you stare at your body and wish you had hair" has stuck with me

I’d like to open a can of worms and ask why no Richard Nixon in the Luhrmann film? Wouldn’t fit the political narrative? I have my own opinions about why E trashed the Beatles to Nixon but that little incident might have added a layer of something to the film.

Also, no Ann-Margret. Another inconvenient character.

parker doesn’t give a shit about those people for one

but also it’s a 2 hour movie covering his entire life as approved by his estate AND PRISCILLA & they’re sure not going to highlight any of his affairs incl Margaret & i dunno that Nixon only underlines how well & truly E had lost the plot which isn’t exactly what they’re going for

it’s not a can of worms
it’s just a different movie

I have no idea what Parker thought of those people but why is he driving the narrative? And Priscilla divorced him bc of affairs, which the thing with Ann-Margret was not, as that happened before Elvis was married

Is it because of what happens on the road?

parker is driving the narrative bc it’s the whole concept of the movie ie elvis’s viewed through parkers eyes thats why .. to show elvis was part of the snowjob & not a babe in the woods

the thing w ann margaret happened while he was dating priscilla + while she was already living at graceland & if she’s signing off on the movie priscilla’s not going to sign off on AM being part of hers & e’s mythology

bc most of this movie is still mythology
its not about truthtelling

I guess I do have a problem with the idea that “this whole thing is the story from the Colonel’s eyes” explains away all the flaws of the film. I still liked the film and thought much of the non-Colonel stuff worked really well.

FWIW, the authorized mini-series with Jonathan Rhys Myers & Randy Quaid from 2005 devoted a bit of space to Ann-Margret (played by Rose McGowan).

i’m not explaining anything away

you want the movie to be something that it’s not and i’m trying to explain the narrow world that the movie operates within by way of explaining why it can’t do the things you want it to do

i love ann margaret & e’s story and i think the nixon story is a great if not kinda depressing oddity but i can watch the movie & at least accept it within its own limited framework instead of wishing a frog had wings or whatever

Nixon has nothing to do with Elvis' life. Neither gave a shit about the appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm8r8FAQFXs

Alfred, I agree, but it’s worth exploring why.

VG, you’re saying the film is the way it is because the director wanted it that way

I’m saying the director made some questionable choices and those are fair to criticize