![]() ![]() I’m sure Elvis was a great guy and an ally or whatever. Elvis is portrayed as a hero of the black community like he was SO GREAT to sing some activist song at a Christmas special instead of Jingle Bells or whatever. We get it, we know, you’re not getting canceled for crediting the musical origins to the wrong person.Īnd yet, like all liberals who think they’re oh so woke, the film had a real white savior complex going on. It was so nauseatingly self congratulatory making sure the audience knows that it knows that Elvis’s signature hip shaking and dancing was commonplace in black performers and in black dance halls. It was so tediously careful to make sure we know that it knows Elvis’s influences came from black musicians of the time who were inventing the style known as “R and B” or Rhythm and Blues. This movie thought it was so woke, making sure to contextualize the civil rights movement with Elvis’s meteoric rise. It was a performance well beyond what the film deserved and my only wish is that it could be plucked out of Elvis and dropped into a more deserving version. He provided heart and history and conflict combined with raw ambition and superhuman talent to take a person that was so larger than life and make him a man. Butler humanized Elvis for generations who didn’t have the opportunity to know him as a celebrity in his lifetime. The one shining star of an otherwise dreadful film is Austin Butler. And he’s the actual star of the movie and most of the movie centers on his character. Hanks had no empathy for his own character and it read like a middle school student playing an evil witch. It was cartoonish, hammy, floundering, totally lacking in credibility, depth or motivation. His turn into this caricature form of acting is a career mistake and it truly stinks. ![]() It was by far his worst performance in his career history. I cannot stress enough how bad Tom Hanks was in this movie. It makes the film seem weirdly shallow and when Pricilla leaves him in the third act it’s actually a little confusing. It did not address that Pricilla was only 14 when she got together with Elvis including a pretty well reported sexual relationship. The film does not address Elvis’s well documented womanizing, drug use or alcoholism. The film also really presents itself like it’s going to be dark and it’s going to show the Elvis behind the Elvis. It spends an inordinate and painful amount of time on his weird relationship with his weird manager. The movie does not lean heavily enough on Elvis’s music or give us enough flavor of his relatively extensive acting career. Not only that but it rushes through Elvis’s life and career creating a sense that the King was kind of a flash in the pan which is absolutely incorrect. It made the absolutely baffling decision to take the first high budget biopic about one of the most important pop culture icons in history and make another character as narrator and focus. It felt extremely derivative of Nightmare Alley in style and in frame but not executed with nearly as much artfulness. Elvis, in my opinion, is his worst film to date. Where films like Moulin Rouge and Romeo and Juliet demonstrate the levels achievable by his genius, others like The Great Gatsby (though I did love Isla Fisher in that) and Elvis really fall short. But it also doesn’t give us much of the good parts of his life, so we’re left with something not even emotional enough to be truly depressing.īaz Luhrmann is known for being extremely hit and miss. The film opens on a carnival and gives sort of creepy carnie vibes but does it very poorly never achieving the level of creep of successful films like Nightmare Alley – it then fills the movie with a very boring, white washed story which lightly brushes over the demons which plagued one of the world’s greatest entertainers. The film presents itself like the dark underbelly of the Elvis Presley story (of which, there is significant material to draw from) but instead presents a completely sanitized version of events which is heavy on a hammy and cartoonish Tom Hanks ( Forrest Gump) as Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker and light on Elvis’s world changing music. Audiences just really liked Austin Butler and that’s fair. ![]() In reviewing the critical analysis almost all of the “high” reviews were actually very tepid in words but strangely high in star rating (pay for play?) and all the top critics panned the film. While Elvis holds an inexplicable 78% critical average on Rotten Tomatoes and 94% for audiences it was actually borderline trash. They said it was high class, but that was just a lie. Overall Rating: If not for Austin Butler, a catastrophe ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |