Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, June 24, 2022) Movie • Page 2

early reviews out. about dozen or so

 

David Ehrlich hates it but the letterboxd reviews I'm seeing seem more favorable.

Sounds like it's very Baz Luhrmann

 

Thread has some interesting things GDT noticed that are pretty awesome, especially with the tidbit that Colonel Parker loved the original Nightmare Alley

 

I can’t wait til this comes out so I can stop seeing the shitty trailer and slowly losing my respect for Tom Hanks.

 

watched this the other night. not as awful as ehrlich says, but it's gotta be one of the worse baz films, despite a few genuinely fun moments interspersed among the movie's 2.5+ hour runtime. whole thing feels garish in a way that doesn't quite translate here compared to something like moulin rouge and it even has a a way of mitigating the weight i was surprised to see butler bring to elvis in a pretty strong performance. both the editing and pacing are clusterfucks, and tom hanks as the colonel did a lot to make me disconnected from what was onscreen, even as the narrator (yep). think the best thing here is that it isn't as blatant of a love letter to elvis as i was fearing

 

one of the worst baz films is a horrid thought

 

Seeing this on IMAX tomorrow, pretty excited; my theater here in Oslo even has some Elvis impersonator band singer/band playing between screenings, haha

 

Did a Moulin Rouge/Great Gatsby double feature this weekend and have a fried brain from a job interview, and sososososo ready for this to be as obnoxious has possible.


My stoned ass also said "thank you very much" to the guy scanning tickets

 

Tom Hanks was bad. Austin Butler will be hard to beat for the Oscar

Other than that, this is certainly up there for me in terms of music biopics.

 

lol neither of them ill be nominated

 

Baz’s name is on the screen five times

And this screen is huge

 

Somehow this had more “Directed by 45 rails of cocaine” energy than “AmbuLAnce.” But still wasn’t very good.

 

The energy is this thing was intense; I guess when you cover like 30 years of his life, you gotta rush through as many bits of his life as you can. Don’t think there was any single shot longer than what, 15 seconds? Tom Hanks was a horrid choice for the manager role; his accent was simply trash. Austin Butler though, imo, killed it; he was really good. I don’t think the film as a whole was bad per se; I got a pretty good sense of the good and bad of his life. Just wish it wasn’t so bananas with its pacing, that we got to dive deeper into certain moments of his life, instead of the surface version we were presented with.

 

I think there's a way to pare it down so you're not being constantly jarred by it jumping from decade to decade in a matter of minutes. And the whole framing it as Parker telling the story just didn't work for me. None of his narration helped.

 

Same; I think the narration should have adhered to “Show, don’t tell”

 

My only issue with the narration was when it went heavy on the fourth-wall breaking near the end with the "you are all the ones that did this" stuff.

I guess I also have a very different opinion of this movie and didn't really mind the batshit insane editing for the most part; ~24 hours on though, what's sticking out to me is some of the shit ADR in the closeups. And even some of the dramatic scenes, what should have been hugely impactful dialogue was completely off. This happened a bunch during the scene of Priscilla leaving.

Things like the performance scenes were what blew me out of the park, that one shot where it's comic book panels and he throws his guitar across to himself in another one was awesome. The Viva Las Vegas scene was also great.


Also, was Austin Butler fat Elvis at the end? I couldn't tell if the whole scene was archive footage or just the end of it (I think it changes aspect ratio)

 

They do show Austin playing the fat Elvis for a bit, but then switch to archive footage at the very end

 

I am never a fan of switching to archive footage in biopics when the movie is still going. If it's during the credits or something, sure. But I think it ruins the immersion. It's a sensationalized biopic, not a documentary.

 

I don't mind it when it's at the end


I also found it funny seeing this clip be created, Tim Heidecker was talking about it on his podcast a few weeks ago

 

In Tom Hanks' defense I'm not quite sure anyone could have figured out what if Werner Herzog was in Citizen Kane but was also The Penguin, obviously you need the Colonel in Elvis' story but he was way too central in the narrative
Austin did a great job and I liked the idea of Elvis deep down being a vulnerable fragile character, and it did a good job with how the man and the myth/brand at a point became inseparable
Baz obviously nails the pure horny lust not just of the women but of the cars , the lifestyle, etc
the kinetic style didn't really bug me except the Little Richard jumpscare and how they just randomly played Doja
I also appreciated that Baz knows that one of the worst things the Colonel did was preventing Elvis from being the lead in A Star Is Born

 

you could have just ... cast christoph waltz?

 

or Mads, Danish and Dutch are the same thing right