Thornton

Click here to read the full article. It’s been a while since I felt beaten up by a movie. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to end that lucky streak. And with a movie about Elvis Presley , no less — hardly a subject to approach casually. Elvis , in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a brash, overwhelming experience. It’s a carnival in movie form: a grand, restless, swirling contraption that’s as grotesque as any bloody-mouthed geek and as uncomfortably poignant as a sad clown. It’s too much. Yet if it were any less excessive, it wouldn’t be as doggedly effective as it often is. Elvis begins at the end — not of Presley’s life, but of the life that consumed and distorted it: Colonel Thomas Parker, his longtime manager. Played by a jowly and insistently unappealing Tom Hanks , Parker is the grandmaster of the tragic spectacle to follow. He is our narrator and admonisher, the man with the megaphone and the whip. A bedridden nobody with the movie starts, Parker … [Read more...] about ‘Elvis’ Is Ecstatic, Jittery, Horny, Tireless, and Tragic. Just Like the King

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 5 The best way to appreciate "Elvis," Baz Luhrmann's audacious, frenetic, occasionally astonishing and ultimately confounding movie about Elvis Presley, is simply to surrender to it. Luhrmann, best known for such kaleidoscopic fantasias as "Romeo and Juliet" and "Moulin Rouge!," possesses just enough hubris to believe himself capable of re-creating the lightning that Elvis Presley embodied, and that continued to make him a pop culture icon decades after his 1977 death. With "Elvis," Luhrmann matches Presley's drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn. The result is a dizzying, almost hallucinatory experience - akin to being thrown into a washing machine and mercilessly churned for 2 1/2 hours. That isn't to say that … [Read more...] about Watching ‘Elvis’ feels like being in a washing machine for 2 ½ hours

In the new Baz Luhrmann film dramatizing the life and career of Elvis Presley, a young Elvis peers into a juke joint in his hometown of Tupelo, Miss., and his jaw drops. Inside, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup sings as a man and woman dance together, their bodies in sync. Elvis is spellbound, stunned into silence, then runs to a Pentecostal revival tent where he makes his way to the center of the worship service. A friend chases him and tries to pull him back, but the preacher allows Elvis to stay. This young man is "with the spirit." The scene pulls from a story once shared with Luhrmann by that friend: Sam Bell, who died last year at age 85. But the depiction is distinctly Luhrmann in all its striking indulgence. The Australian filmmaker frames Elvis's spiritual awakening as a musical one, too, later employing a split-screen juxtaposing Crudup's version of "That's All Right" with Elvis (Austin Butler) performing the song as his debut single. "I can't overstate enough: You can't tell the … [Read more...] about How Baz Luhrmann depicts Elvis’s contested ties to Black artistry