"ELVIS" (2022) Reviews etc.

[Private Presley]

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/a ... z-luhrmann

The only problem with Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is that it isn't longer
We can't believe we're saying this, but 2 hours 39 minutes wasn't enough – either of the King of Rock n Roll's story or lead actor Austin Butler's star-making performance. Get ready to thrust your hips for one of the best films of 2022 so far

By Sam Parker
21 June 2022

Anyone contemplating a trip to see Baz Luhrmann's high octane, much-publicised Elvis movie this weekend may well baulk at its 2-hour 39 minutes running time. The kind of length usually reserved for bloated Marvel flicks or arthouse directors being over-indulged on Netflix, films above the two and half hour mark usually leave you wondering who, if anyone, actually edited this thing (likely answer: no one!).

But Luhrmann isn’t a typical director, and Elvis isn’t a typical rock and roll biopic. Yes, strictly speaking, it tells the story of Elvis Aaron Presley, from his unconventional upbringing in Memphis right through to his lonely death in a Vegas hotel room. But it also manages to tell the story of America in the ‘50s, ’60s and '70s, which as much as anything is really the story of the birth of popular culture, celebrity and the new, capitalism-fuelled concept of being a teenager. Elvis was the unwitting mascot for all three, and in some senses remains so.

The breadth of the narrative, combined with Luhrmann’s frenetic, singular editing style means that, somehow, a little under three hours in a movie theatre doesn’t drag. In fact, reports there’s a four-hour-long Director’s Cut of Elvis waiting in Baz’s vault somewhere is actually rather enticing, which as somehow who likes their movies closer to the 90-minute mark is something I never expected to say.

OK, the first ten minutes of Elvis is admittedly ‘a bit much’: a relentless assault of huge musical notes, zip-zoom camera work and feverish montages. The film seems to be begging you to stick around, in the same way the opening of Romeo and Juliet, the film that made Luhrmann’s name back in 1996, did (Don’t worry, it seems to cry, I promise this is going to be fun!!). For a Shakespeare adaptation, this made sense: its appeal to young people relied as much on not feeling like a school trip to the local theatre as it did on Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-new blonde locks. You sense a similar initial doubt with Elvis in how cool or appealing the film’s subject matter is, and perhaps with good reason: the singer hasn’t really had a relevant or cool-again moment since that Apple advert remix of 'A Little Less Conversation’ in 2002.

But then two things happen. First, the film calms down a bit and the pace begins to vary. You remember Luhrmann is now of veteran of big cinema in complete control of his craft, rather than a young buck out to make a splash. Like Elvis’s music, the film begins to move like a ballad in places and in others, an explosion of rock and roll. The scene of Presley’s first gig, in which women of various ages reacted to his obscene hip thrusts with spontaneous peels of pent-up excitement and/or sexual frustration, is a virtuoso five minutes of filmmaking worth the price of entry alone: utterly thrilling and very funny at the same time. Like the dawn-lit dog chase in No Country For Old Men, it’s a masterpiece short within a full-length movie.

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Which brings us to the other reason Elvis doesn’t only justify its long running time, but is comfortably one of the films of the year so far: Austin Butler. It’s hard to imagine a bigger potential banana skin of an acting role than Elvis Presley, a man so eclipsed by caricature and impression, you can forget he was real flesh and blood. Austin Butler doesn’t just pull it off but is absolute dynamite in the role, somehow embodying The King while at the same time emerging as an unmistakable new star in the cinematic sky. The voice and the look is all perfect, but the hubris and humanity he brings to Elvis is a revelation. Luhrmann has compared Butler's breakout to Leo’s back in 1996, but in truth it’s an even stronger performance than the lovesick Romeo. You don’t want to take your eyes off him, and in his hands Elvis is rehabilitated before your eyes from pop culture punchline to the brooding but vulnerable icon people fell in love with in the first place.

There have been grumblings about Tom Hanks, who co-stars as Elvis’s manipulative manager Tom Parker. But a few superfluous bits of narration aside, in which a deathbed Parker throws chips around a dreamlike casino, I actually didn’t mind the role. Yes, Hanks wears a fat suit and adopts a strange accent, but he’s an intelligent enough actor not to turn Parker into a cartoon baddie, and overall it lends the film a welcome extra scope to see how he took Presley’s naivety and used it to destroy him. Olivia DeJonge is underused as Priscilla, which is sadly usually the way of things, and the film could do with a stronger strain of secondary characters, but all of this somewhat proves my point: despite being about the most spoofed man of all time, despite being nearly three hours long, Elvis is a film that leaves you wanting more, not less.

[Private Presley]

https://time.com/6181818/elvis-movie-review/

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Is an Exhilarating, Maddening Spectacle—But One Made With Love

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
MAY 26, 2022 11:49 AM EDT

Baz Luhrmann’s movies—even the great ones, like his 1996 Shakespeare-via-Tiger Beat romance Romeo + Juliet, or The Great Gatsby, from 2013, a fringed shimmy of decadence and loneliness—are loathed by many for what they see as the director’s garishness, his adoration of spectacle, his penchant for headache-inducing, mincemeat-and-glitter editing. But in 2022, in a culture where long-form series storytelling reigns supreme, Luhrmann’s devotion to two-and-a-half-hour bursts of excess is pleasingly old-fashioned, like a confetti blast from a cannon at a county fair. It’s true that his movies don’t always work, or rarely work all the way though, and that’s certainly the case with Elvis, his sequined jumpsuit of a biopic playing out of competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival. At times it’s barely a movie—the first hour or so is exceptionally fragmented and frenetic, as if Luhrmann were time-traveling through a holographic rendering of Elvis Presley’s life, dipping and darting through the significant events with little time to touch down. But through all the arty overindulgences, one truth shines through: Luhrmann loves Elvis so much it hurts. And in a world where there’s always, supposedly, a constant stream of new things to love, or at least to binge-watch, love of Elvis—our American pauper king with a cloth-of-gold voice—feels like a truly pure thing.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis. Though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—his identical twin, Jesse Garon, died at birth—Elvis grew up poor in Memphis, adoring and being adored by his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Luhrmann shows us Elvis as a preadolescent, splitting his time between a juke joint and a revival tent down the road. (Too young to get into the former, he could only peer through a crack in the wall, entranced by the Black blues guys performing inside.) These are the twin poles of young Elvis’ life, the foundation for all that came after, and Luhrmann connects them in one extremely stylized shot: in Elvis world, gospel and blues are literally connected by one dirt road. This junior version of Elvis goes back and forth freely, drinking deeply from one well before moving to the other, and back again.

His rise happens quickly, and before you know it, he’s become the Elvis we know, or the one we think we know: he’s played by Austin Butler, who goes beyond merely replicating Elvis’ signature moves (though he’s terrific at that); he seems to be striving to conjure some phantasmal fingerprint. For long stretches of the movie, Butler’s Elvis doesn’t really have many lines: we see him, in his pre-fame years, jumping out of the truck he drives for a living and walking down a Memphis street, swinging a guitar in one hand a lunchbox in the other. Did the real-life Elvis actually do this? Doubtful. But isn’t it exactly what you want to see in a movie?

Before long, our movie Elvis has landed a slot performing on the Louisiana Hayride, and Sam Phillips over at Sun Studios—who specializes in “race records,” music made by Black performers—takes a chance on him at the behest of his assistant, Marion Keisker, who hears something in the kid. Elvis cuts a record. Then he’s jiggling onstage in a loose pink suit, its supple fabric hiding more than it reveals, but even so, the world gets a hint at the secrets contained therein. The girls, and most of the boys, too, go nuts.

Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath. Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. (Catherine Martin’s costume and production design is, as always, exemplary—period-perfect but also brushed with imaginative flourishes.) We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) shops there. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. (He was supposed to put on a garish Christmas sweater and sing some piece of holiday dreck, not become the stuff of legend in a black leather suit that, you just know, would be hot to the touch if only you could get close enough to it.)

But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. When Elvis’ long-suffering wife Priscilla (played by Olivia DeJonge) finally leaves him, he chases after her, rushing down the staircase at Graceland in pants and a purple robe, a drugged-out mess. She can’t take it anymore; she’s got to leave, and she’s taking little Lisa Marie with her. Elvis stands there in bare feet, begging her not to go. And when he realizes he can’t stop her, he says, more in defeat than in hopefulness, “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be back together—you’ll see.” Even if Elvis never really uttered that line, its map of romantic longing had long been written in his voice. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. That voice is a repository of every joy and misery that life could possibly hold.

Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath. Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. (Catherine Martin’s costume and production design is, as always, exemplary—period-perfect but also brushed with imaginative flourishes.) We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) shops there. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. (He was supposed to put on a garish Christmas sweater and sing some piece of holiday dreck, not become the stuff of legend in a black leather suit that, you just know, would be hot to the touch if only you could get close enough to it.)

But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. When Elvis’ long-suffering wife Priscilla (played by Olivia DeJonge) finally leaves him, he chases after her, rushing down the staircase at Graceland in pants and a purple robe, a drugged-out mess. She can’t take it anymore; she’s got to leave, and she’s taking little Lisa Marie with her. Elvis stands there in bare feet, begging her not to go. And when he realizes he can’t stop her, he says, more in defeat than in hopefulness, “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be back together—you’ll see.” Even if Elvis never really uttered that line, its map of romantic longing had long been written in his voice. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. That voice is a repository of every joy and misery that life could possibly hold.

Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath. Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. (Catherine Martin’s costume and production design is, as always, exemplary—period-perfect but also brushed with imaginative flourishes.) We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) shops there. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. (He was supposed to put on a garish Christmas sweater and sing some piece of holiday dreck, not become the stuff of legend in a black leather suit that, you just know, would be hot to the touch if only you could get close enough to it.)

But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. When Elvis’ long-suffering wife Priscilla (played by Olivia DeJonge) finally leaves him, he chases after her, rushing down the staircase at Graceland in pants and a purple robe, a drugged-out mess. She can’t take it anymore; she’s got to leave, and she’s taking little Lisa Marie with her. Elvis stands there in bare feet, begging her not to go. And when he realizes he can’t stop her, he says, more in defeat than in hopefulness, “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be back together—you’ll see.” Even if Elvis never really uttered that line, its map of romantic longing had long been written in his voice. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. That voice is a repository of every joy and misery that life could possibly hold.

When the trailer for Elvis was released, a few months back, the responses on social media, and among people I know, ranged from “That looks unhinged! I’m dying to see it!” to “I can’t even look at that thing,” to “What accent, exactly, is Tom Hanks trying to achieve?” (The movie, incidentally, explains the unidentifiable diction of this man without a country, and probably without a soul.) In the movie’s last moments, Luhrmann recreates one of the saddest Elvis remnants, a live performance of “Unchained Melody” from June of 1977, just two months before his death. Butler, his face puffed out with prosthetics, sits at a grand piano littered with Coca Cola cups and a discarded terrycloth towel or two. The song, a swallow’s swoop of longing, begins pouring out of Elvis’s wrecked body—but as we watch, Luhrmann pulls a mystical switch, and footage of the real Elvis replaces the magnificent Butler-as-Elvis doppelgänger we’ve been watching. For a few confusing moments, the real Elvis is no longer a ghost—he has returned to us, an actor playing himself, and we see that as good as that Butler kid was, there’s no comparison to the real thing.

But the feeling of relief is fleeting. Elvis, now gone for more than 40 years, is a ghost, no matter how passionately Luhrmann and Butler have tried to reconstitute his ectoplasm. The only consolation is that when a person is no longer a person, he is at last free to become a dream. In the final moments of Elvis, Luhrmann returns his beloved subject to that world, like a fisherman freeing his catch. “Lonely rivers flow/to the sea, to the sea,” the song tells us, as the true Elvis swims back to his home of safety—he’s better off as a dream, maybe, safe from everyone who might hurt or use him. But for a few hours there, he seemed to walk among us once again, a sighting that no one would believe if we tried to tell them. But we saw him. We really did. And then he slipped away, having had enough of our claim over him, if never enough of our love.

[Private Presley]

https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/e ... 235269244/

‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic, Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, Is a Stylishly On-the-Surface Life-of-Elvis Impersonation Until It Takes Off in Vegas
It's a spectacle that keeps us watching but doesn't nail Elvis's inner life until he's caught in a trap.

by Owen Gleiberman\

Elvis Presley, with the exception of the Beatles, is the most mythological figure in the history of popular music. That makes him a singularly tempting figure to build a biopic around. But it also makes telling his story a unique challenge. Everything about Elvis (the rise, the fall, all that came in between) is so deeply etched in our imaginations that when you make a dramatic feature film out of Elvis Presley’s life, you’re not just channeling the mythology — you’re competing with it. The challenge is: What can you bring to the table that’s headier and more awesome than the real thing?

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.

Yet “Elvis,” for all its Luhrmannian fireworks, is a strange movie — compelling but not always convincing, at once sweeping and scattershot, with a central figure whose life, for a long stretch, feels like it’s being not so much dramatized as illustrated.

Austin Butler, the 30-year-old actor who plays Elvis, has bedroom eyes and cherubic lips and nails the king’s electrostatic moves. He also does a reasonably good impersonation of Elvis’s sultry velvet drawl. Yet his resemblance to Elvis never quite hits you in the solar plexus. Butler looks more like the young John Travolta crossed with Jason Priestly, and I think the reason this nags at one isn’t just because Elvis was (arguably) the most beautiful man of the 20th century. It’s also that Butler, though he knows how to bring the good-ol’-boy sexiness, lacks Elvis’s danger. Elvis had a come-hither demon glare nestled within that twinkle of a smile. We’ve lived for half a century in a world of Elvis impersonators, and Butler, like most of them, has a close-but-not-the-real-thing quality. He doesn’t quite summon Elvis’s inner aura of hound-dog majesty.

Luhrmann has always had the fearlessness of his own flamboyance, and from the first moments of “Elvis,” which take off from an outrageous bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. logo, the film lets us know that it’s going to risk vulgarity to touch the essence of the Elvis saga. There’s a luscious opening fanfare of split-screen imagery, showing us how Elvis loomed at every stage — as the smoldering kid whose hip-swiveling, leg-jittering gyrations knocked the stuffing out of our sexual propriety, and as the decadent Vegas showman who flogged his own legend until it was (no pun intended) larger-than-life.

But the way that Butler comes off as more harmless than the real Elvis ties into the key problem with the film’s first half. Luhrmann is out to capture how Elvis, with his thrusts and his eyeliner and his inky black hair falling over his face, was a one-man sexual earthquake who remade the world. Yet Elvis’s transformation of the world was, in fact, so total and triumphant that it may now be close to impossible for a movie to capture how radical it was. With its over-the-top shots of women at Elvis’s early shows erupting into spontaneous screams, or throwing underwear onstage, plus scandalous headlines and finger-wagging moral gatekeepers growing hysterical over how Elvis was busting down racial barriers or promoting “indecency,” “Elvis” keeps telling us that it’s about an insurrectionary figure. The irony is that Luhrmann’s style is too ripely sensual, too post-Elvis, to evoke what the world was like before Elvis.

We see Elvis as a boy sneaking into a Black tent-show revival, fusing with the writhing gospel he encounters there, or hearing Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) sing “That’s All Right Mama” in a slow high blues wail. Then we hear what Elvis did with that music, syncing it to his own speedy spirit. Elvis stole the blues, all right, or at least borrowed them, but the movie shows us how he frosted them with a bouncy layer of country optimism and his own white-boy exhibitionism. The film dunks us in Elvis’s blue-suede bliss and then checks us, after a while, into his heartbreak hotel. In a way, though, I wish that Luhrmann had told Elvis’s story in the insanely baroque, almost hallucinogenic fashion of “Moulin Rouge!” For all the Elvis tunes on the soundtrack, the film doesn’t have enough musical epiphanies — scenes that blow your mind and heart with their rock ‘n’ roll magic.

And what “Elvis” never quite shows us, at least not until its superior second half, is what was going on inside Elvis Presley. For a while, the film plays like a graphic novel on amphetamines, skittering over the Elvis iconography but remaining playfully detached from his soul. Instead, it filters his story through the point-of-view of his Mephistophelean manager Svengali, Col. Tom Parker, who is played by Tom Hanks, under pounds of padding and a hideous comb-over, as a carny-barker showman with a hooked nose and a gleam of evil in his eye.

By framing “Elvis” as if it were Parker’s self-justifying story, the movie structures itself as a tease: Will it really show us that Parker, as he claims in his voice-over narration, has been given a bum rap by history? That he not only made Presley’s career but had his best interests at heart? No, it will not. Yet Luhrmann, in presenting the Dutch-born, never legally emigrated Parker (née Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) as a master flimflam artist who saw himself as the P.T Barnum of rock ‘n’ roll, revels in a certain fascinating ambivalence. Hanks, with his mustache-twirling accent and avaricious gleam, makes Parker a cousin to Jim Broadbent’s nightclub impresario in “Moulin Rouge!” — a corrupt showman who will do and say anything to keep the show going. Parker latches onto Elvis in 1955, then stage manages his career to within an inch of its life. Elvis, turned into the Colonel’s hard-working show horse, becomes a victim of Stockholm syndrome; no matter how much he sees through the Colonel’s schemes, he can’t bring himself to quit him. Yet he spends the rest of his life rebelling against him.

The movie shows us how Elvis’s career, after its volcano eruption in the mid-’50s, became a series of defeats and escapes. To calm the controversies that Elvis first inspired, the Colonel repackages him as “the new Elvis” (read: a singer of family-friendly ballads), which only makes Elvis miserable. To further defuse the attacks upon him, Parker, in 1958, encourages Elvis to go into the Army as a way to clean up his image. Stationed in Germany, Elvis meets the teenage Priscilla — but it’s one of the film’s telling flaws that the actress who plays her, Olivia DeJonge, registers strongly in an early scene but scarcely has the chance to color in her performance. Given the film’s epic ambition, the script of “Elvis” (by Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) is a weirdly bare-bones affair. Hanks delivers a performance that’s a luscious piece of hambone duplicity, but why aren’t there more piercingly written scenes between Elvis and the Colonel? Or Elvis and Priscilla? The Colonel should have been a great character, not a succulent trickster cartoon. If these relationships had been enriched, the story might have taken off more.

That Luhrmann compresses most of the 1960s into a two-minute campy montage, which parodies Elvis’s life as if it were one of his movies, is the clearest sign that “Elvis” is no orthodox biopic. The film’s second act leaps ahead to Elvis’s 1968 comeback special — the filming of it, and the backstage politics, which involve Parker promising NBC that they’re going to be getting a Christmas special, a plan we see undermined at every turn by Elvis and the show’s director, Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery). The comeback special was, of course, a triumph, but the way Luhrmann tries to package it as a drama of sneaky rebellion doesn’t quite come off.

What comes off with startling power is the final third of the movie, which is set in Las Vegas during Elvis’s five-year residence at the International Hotel. For years, it became a cliché to mock Elvis for having embraced the shameless Middle American vulgarity of Vegas: the shows that opened with the “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fanfare from “2001,” the karate moves, the brassy orchestral sound of songs like his reconfigured “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And, of course, he was on drugs the whole time. What Luhrmann grasps is that the Vegas years, in their white-suited glitz way, were trailblazing and stupendous — and that Col. Parker, in his greedy way, was a showbiz visionary for booking Elvis into that setting. The film captures how Elvis did some of his greatest work as a singer there, apotheosized by the avid ecstasy of “Burning Love.”

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.

[ColinB]

Not a bad review in todays 'i' UK Newspaper:

[ColinB]

Just got home from seeing it at the Bluewater Shopping Centre near Dartford.

Highly recommended !

OK - a few chronological errors, but the 'feel' of the story was so well captured !

Soon forgot that it was Tom Hanks playing Parker who didn't get a whitewash job after all !

Austin Butler had the Elvis 'moves' down to a T, especially in the Vegas performances !

Priscilla got let off pretty lightly, with her indiscretions avoiding any mention.

Poor Scotty Moore & Bill Black had only minor parts.

An enjoyable journey through his life with some bits rushed through & some kinda dwelt on !

A lot of time was spent chronicling his younger self mixing with, & getting influenced by, the Tupelo/Memphis black community.

And what an ending !

[Private Presley]

This was played over the closing credits.

[Alan]

Thought I didnt like it, very addictive, listened to the end and I like it!

[Private Presley]

Just got home from seeing it at the Bluewater Shopping Centre near Dartford.

Highly recommended !

OK - a few chronological errors, but the 'feel' of the story was so well captured !

Soon forgot that it was Tom Hanks playing Parker who didn't get a whitewash job after all !

Austin Butler had the Elvis 'moves' down to a T, especially in the Vegas performances !

Priscilla got let off pretty lightly, with her indiscretions avoiding any mention.

Poor Scotty Moore & Bill Black had only minor parts.

An enjoyable journey through his life with some bits rushed through & some kinda dwelt on !

A lot of time was spent chronicling his younger self mixing with, & getting influenced by, the Tupelo/Memphis black community.

And what an ending !

I agree with you that it is highly recommended. The pacing was fantastic but Luhrmann took some artistic license on the chronology and some of the songs like "Trouble" being sung at Russwood Park but it works in the context, and the tuxedo and singing to the basset hound being Parker's idea.
Butler nailed all the Elvis moves specially the 'If I Can Dream' and like you said the Vegas performances.

[Private Presley]

I read that WB owns the rights to the Elvis On Tour footage. So if the film Elvis is a box office hit, hopefully (wishful thinking) WB might released the unseen EOT footage.

[ColinB]

I read that WB owns the rights to the Elvis On Tour footage.
So if the film Elvis is a box office hit, hopefully (wishful thinking) WB might released the unseed EOT footage.

That would be great !

WB would need to see it as a commercially attractive move for them.

Musical film footage is expensive !

Greedy owners of the song copyrights demand an arm & a leg for their use !

Unlike audio stuff on CD, where there are fixed rates, for visual stuff the audio used has to be 'negotiated' for every release.

Just look at what happened with Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B Goode' !

[Alan]

I read that WB owns the rights to the Elvis On Tour footage. So if the film Elvis is a box office hit, hopefully (wishful thinking) WB might released the unseen EOT footage.

Toe in the water.
They're prommoting associated Elvis films with adverts on social media, so they might be guaging nterrest based upon that (in a way I hope not).
Also, a more direct comparison should be the amont of interest and demand for Peter Jacksons Beatles epic from the unseen archives from the filming of Let It Be, Get Back.

[Alan]

To Sam Parker, who did the review for GQ Magazine.
Are you sure you've seen the film youre reviewing?
Do you really have a basic knowledge of it's subject?

But Luhrmann isn’t a typical director, and Elvis isn’t a typical rock and roll biopic. Yes, strictly speaking, it tells the story of Elvis Aaron Presley, from his unconventional upbringing in Memphis right through to his lonely death in a Vegas hotel room.

I know directors can take a little artistic license here and there, but really?

[Private Presley]

To Sam Parker, who did the review for GQ Magazine.
Are you sure you've seen the film youre reviewing?
Do you really have a basic knowledge of it's subject?

But Luhrmann isn’t a typical director, and Elvis isn’t a typical rock and roll biopic. Yes, strictly speaking, it tells the story of Elvis Aaron Presley, from his unconventional upbringing in Memphis right through to his lonely death in a Vegas hotel room.

I know directors can take a little artistic license here and there, but really?

The movie did not show where Elvis died.. it just showed the newspaper headline!!! The reviewer does not know what he is writing about!

[Private Presley]

https://variety.com/2022/film/box-offic ... 235304037/

‘Elvis’ Beats ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ By $1 Million in Heated Box Office Battle
June 27, 2022

By Rebecca Rubin

The King is No. 1 at the domestic box office.

After a heated box office battle, “Elvis” emerged victorious over “Top Gun: Maverick” to claim the top spot on North American box office charts.

Over the weekend, “Elvis” and “Top Gun: Maverick” were duking it out as the King of Rock and Roll took the No. 1 spot on Friday and dropped to second place on Saturday. Then on Sunday, the films tied for first place in North America, with each earning an estimated $30.5 million over the three day period.

With the final results tallied on Monday, “Elvis” generated $31.1 million from 3,906 theaters in its box office debut while “Top Gun: Maverick” brought in $29.6 million from 3,948 venues in its fifth weekend in theaters.

Although “Elvis” ultimately took the box office crown, both films can boast a strong result. For “Elvis,” a $31 million debut is promising for an adult-skewing drama since its core demographic does not traditionally rush out to see a movie on opening weekend. However, Warner Bros. spent $85 million to produce the film, not accounting for marketing or distribution costs, so “Elvis” has to keep playing in theaters throughout the summer to turn a profit.

It’ll help that “Elvis,” a larger-than-life musical biopic starring Austin Butler, has been well-received by audiences, who awarded the film an “A-” CinemaScore. Baz Luhrmann directed the film, which chronicles the performer’s meteoric rise to fame through the eyes of his morally ambiguous manager, Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks).

In fairness to "Top Gun: Maverick" it was its 5th week of showing.
Anyway, the initial report was both films tied for first place.

[Private Presley]

Posted by Robert Klein on Facebook