Some thoughts on Elvis (2022)

I was dreading Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. A long time ago, I had written my own Elvis project, and had done a deep dive into his life and work. I’ve watched a lot of Elvis-related movies (including all 33 of Elvis’s own movies), and the trailers for Luhrmann’s gonzo spectacle were a severe turn-off for me. But enough friends of mine had positive things to say about it that I thought I’d give it a chance.Almost immediately, I fell in love. I have lots and lots of quibbles about this and that, but the important thing is that Luhrmann’s understanding of Elvis, his art, his story, and his place in the American pantheon of great 20th-century artists, is the same as mine.Most people my age and younger experienced Elvis’s career backwards: when I was a child, Presley was a joke, a has-been, a bloated cartoon character adored by yokels and middle-aged women. He wore the gaudy jumpsuits and did his lame kung-fu moves, and recycled his ancient hits with blaring, Vegas arrangements that deprived the music of any of its original power. Elvis was sentimental, hollow and tasteless, and, when he died in 1977, it felt like more of a relief than a tragedy: at last, the empty, spangled parade float of his career was put out of its misery.Most of the movies made about Elvis begin with the same philosophy: start with the spectacle, never the art. In most Elvis projects, Elvis is a pawn, a wild animal, a naive wild card, a crazed lunatic, a wayward soul, a victim of greed, but never a serious artist. Luhrmann’s Elvis is the first project I’ve seen that actually takes Elvis serious as an artist, as a real, honest-to-goodness musician with a vision and artistic goals. It places Elvis in the context of his times, something that’s impossible to do when you start with his jumpsuits and drug use and work backwards.I had a number of misgivings about Austin Butler’s performance in the first hour or so of the movie, but all those doubts evaporated when it came time to the 1968 comeback special, where he not only was able to match (or at least approximate) Elvis’s incredible energy and handsomeness of that time, but also get across the very serious, very important artistic thrust of that show. Because while the show looks like old television to us now, it was absolutely a bolt from the blue in its time, a radical, bizarre, soulful and crucial turning point in Elvis’s career. And yes, Robert Kennedy really was killed while they were shooting the special, and yes, Col Tom really did have a heart attack when Elvis refused to sing Christmas songs in front of a fireplace. The emphasis the movie gives to the creation of that special is pitch-perfect, and the dramatization of events that led to Elvis singing “If I Can Dream,” along with Butler’s pantomime of Elvis’s performance of that number, had me sobbing for minutes on end. Not weeping, or choked up, but openly, audibly sobbing. Elvis’s message for the special was “I am still here, and still relevant,” and he thought it was vital that he close the show with some sort of statement on all the things that were happening in 1968. The fact that he chose “If I Can Dream” not only puts an exclamation point on the show, but also cements his point of view on the world. Everything that Elvis ever dreamed came true, a million times over, so if he could dream of a better world, why couldn’t that dream also come true? The answer is, of course, that Elvis was but a man, a mere singer (how ironic the show was sponsored by Singer), and had no power to shape current events. The repeated question, “why can’t this happen,” shows the song to be a prayer, both a pleading and an insistence. The repetition of the question reveals that the singer knows the answer but must still ask the question. Luhrmann’s movie gets across all that artistic turmoil without ever having to state any of it. The same goes for the construction of Elvis’s Vegas shows of 1969: while people my age were repulsed by the 1970s Elvis, Luhrmann’s movie places those decisions in context as well: as deliberate artistic choices made by a valid musical force who was looking for answers. He dressed like a superhero because he thought of himself as Captain Marvel (or Shazam, as he’s called now). (The lightning bolt from his TCB logo was lifted directly from Captain Marvel’s suit.) The splashy Vegas arrangements of ancient blues songs weren’t meant as a cheapening of an authentic musical form, they were meant to spread the message on the largest canvas available, and the movie brilliantly brings those decisions to life, drawing a direct line from Elvis overhearing Arthur Crudup sing “That’s All Right” in a Mississippi whorehouse to Elvis belting it out on the biggest stage in Vegas: not a cheapening, but, in Elvis’s eyes, an exaltation, a spreading of the gospel.As with any bio-pic, events are simplified and motivations are overstated. Luhrmann is, after all, the opposite of a subtle director. Overstatement is the water he swims in. If he wants to make a narrative point, he doesn’t just underline it, he underlines it, in italics, then draws a circle around it, then draws a bunch of arrows pointing to it, then states it again for the people who didn’t catch it the first five times. The difference between Luhrmann and, say, Oliver Stone, another director with a penchant for overstatement, is that Luhrmann understands cinematic narrative in a way that no other director does, and his bag of tricks is vast and endlessly malleable. He compresses time as all bio-pics do, but does it in a dazzling, fluid, exciting way, with tons of information going on all the time in every corner of the screen. His goal is to catch you up in the sheer giddy pleasure of images, over and over again, to get you drunk on the sheer spectacle of ideas unfolding. After seeing his Great Gatsby, I thought, well, that’s not the movie I would have made, but, well, it’s The Great Gatsby, you can’t look at it and say he betrayed the author. He didn’t destroy Fitzgerald, he just put it in neon. Just as Elvis turned the blues into a Vegas spectacle because he wanted to preach to the largest possible crowd, Luhrmann wanted to make sure that Gatsby, a fragile, tender, interior novel about sadness and regret, into a mind-blowing spectacle, because he truly loved the material and wanted people to see it.And, while I can’t say I fully understand what Tom Hanks is doing in the movie, with his bizarre accent and weird prosthetics, his Col Tom is, by far, the most humane, most nuanced portrayal of the old Mephistopheles I’ve ever seen. It still astonishes me that Col Tom referred to himself as “the king of the snowmen,” and had a banner hanging in his office advertising it. How many devils tell you to your face that they are a devil? Even Donald Trump didn’t say “vote for me, I’m a con man here to take your money.” And yet, Col Tom STARTED with that pitch. He introduced himself, advertised himself as a carny man, a man who literally spray-painted sparrows and sold them as canaries. When I wrote my Elvis musical (with incredible songs written by Chuck Montgomery, who also played Elvis), I could not explain in the time given why Col Tom had such a hold on Elvis, so I instead I made him a hypnotist. I gave him a jeweled-top cane that he used like Jafar’s staff in Aladdin. Luhrmann finally gives Col Tom an actual dramatization of his relationship with Elvis, showing him as both the father figure Elvis couldn’t find in his own father, a confidante who understood Elvis’s desperate need for attention, and, most importantly, a man whose only goal was profit. In the great American story of Elvis’s life, Col Tom is the vital component: the capitalist greed that destroys everything it touches.By the end of the movie I was an emotional wreck, not merely because the movie got so much right about the tragedy of Elvis, but because I was seeing a movie that I wish I’d been able to write.

107Shannon Sollman, Robert Sikoryak and 105 others36 Comments4 Shares

Family Movie Night: Spinout

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We’ve been having Family Movie Nights on weekends here at chez Alcott. Last weekend it was The Sound of Music, last night it was Monsters, Inc. (which deserves its own in-depth analysis for its ingenious plotting alone), and tonight, for some reason, the kids requested the 1966 Elvis Presley vehicle Spinout.

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If you’re looking for trouble…

It is not the goal of this journal to engage in cheap gossip. However, it has come to my attention that Britney Spears has, apparently intentionally, crossed over into an area of my interest.

I know almost nothing about Britney Spears, except that she was a music star a while back and has since gone on to a career in gossip headlines. Her appearance the other night at MTV’s VMAs was front-page news on, of all things, The New York Times, which got my attention, but when one of my favorite comics bloggers Occasional Superheroine devoted a column to it, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

First, I know nothing about the music of Britney Spears, except that she probably doesn’t make enough of it.  It seems to me, if everyone talks about you being washed up, the answer to that is to work more.  Maybe the work will suck, maybe it won’t, maybe it will take you in strange new directions, but if you don’t go away sooner or later they have to take you seriously.  If Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello or Madonna packed it up every time critics said they sucked, our musical landscape would have a much different shape today.

So okay, maybe Britney Spears doesn’t have that kind of ambition or talent.  So fine.  But then, here she is, making her “comeback.”  Now then, the thing about “comebacks?”  You don’t call it a “comeback.”  You don’t get to decide you’re making a “comeback,” it’s for other people to say when you’ve made a “comeback.”

Now then: Ms. Spears, for reasons that utterly baffle me, chose for her “comeback” appearance an homage/parody/whatever to the opening of Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special (and please note that the ’68 Comeback Special was originally known as something like “Singer Presents Elvis” or some other godawful corporate title).  She has cleverly changed the words of “Trouble” to the words from “Woman” (both songs were written by Leiber and Stoller, and have the same melodies).

(I, for one, do not criticize Ms. Spears for gaining weight.  If “hotness” is what she was after, she looked plenty “hot” to me (although her spangled bikini did not seem to fit her well).  HOWEVER, if you’re going to go out on stage like that, perhaps it’s best not to open with a song that contains the lyrics “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan.”  Because all I could think of after that was “And then eat it.”)

The question is, WHY, oh why, would Britney Spears choose to honor/parody/whatever one of the true diamond-hard everlasting moments of Pop Greatness for her “comeback?”  The “Trouble/Guitar Man” number at the top of the ’68 Comeback Special is still electrifying and flabbergasting 40 years later — and Britney Spears makes a deliberate allusion to it, hoping to compare herself to — what now?  Elvis?  Twelve years after he changed the face of American culture, ten years after being drafted, eight years after starting his string of never-ending soul-crushing movies?  Britney is inviting us to compare her years in the wilderness to that?

All would have been forgiven, of course, if she had then delivered.  But she did not.  Her performance of the number is abysmal — she shuffles around the stage as though she just woke up, not bothering to lip-sync, much less sing, pacing through the dance routines as though practicing in front of the TV instead of performing in front of millions of viewers.

Anyway, there’s my two cents.

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Happy Death Day

No doubt you have been alerted through your local media outlet that this is the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. I could write a lot about this event, but unfortunately this is not the week for me to do that. However, if you wish to celebrate this sacred holiday by watching an Elvis movie, I recommend this as a helpful aid to your selection.


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Elvis vs. Elvis

These two songs came up on iTunes today, two of my favorite music stars ever, illustrating two approaches to writing songs about women.

Elvis C’s description of his subject is bitter, multi-layered, multi-dimensional and hyper-literate:

“So you began to recognize the well-dressed man that everybody loves
It started when you chopped off all the fingers on your pony skin gloves
Then you cut a hole out where your love-light used to shine
Your tears of pleasure equal measure crocodile and brine
You tried to laugh it all off saying “I knew all the time…
But it’s starting to come to me”

— Elvis Costello, “Starting to Come to Me”

While Elvis P’s view is more practical, topical and down-to-earth.

“And when I pick up a sandwich to munch
A crunch-a-crunchity-a-crunchity-crunch
I never ever get to finish my lunch
Because there’s always bound to be a bunch of girls”

Elvis Presley, “Girls!  Girls!  Girls!”
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Long Live the King

Today, January 8, is Elvis Presley’s birthday.  He would have been 72.

When people learn I am an Elvis specialist, they often ask me, “Did Elvis Presley make any good movies?”

The answer, sadly, is no.  Elvis Presley did not make any good movies. 

There are, however, good Elvis Presley movies.

Elvis Presley made 31 feature films between 1957 and 1969 and, by any objective measure, they’re all terrible.  Elvis movies, like James Bond movies, Star Trek movies, Bollywood musicals, Italian zombie movies and Japanese horror movies, cannot be enjoyed if compared to other “real” movies.  They’re horrible.  They’re beyond horrible.  They’re stupid, boring and comically inept.  You watch an Elvis movie and you can’t believe people went to see them, three times a year, for ten years.  You watch an Elvis Presley movie and you can’t believe Elvis Presley was ever a star, much less the most important American artist of the twentieth century.  You watch an Elvis movie and it seems unbelievable that Elvis was, when his film career began, the biggest star on the planet.  You watch an Elvis movie and you have to remind yourself that these movies were made at the same time as Dr. Strangelove, West Side Story, Persona, Lawrence of Arabia, Jules et Jim, Bullitt, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bonnie and Clyde, not to mention A Hard Day’s Night, Help! and Yellow Submarine.  The biggest star on the planet couldn’t get a decent movie made around him to save his life.  And as a result, he became no longer the biggest star on the planet.

There are a lot of reasons for this, which I can go into another time.  Hint: they have to do with Col. Tom Parker being an evil, evil man.

For us Elvis fans, the movies’ flaws only make them more endearing.  If you take them on their own terms, if you approach them with the same level of expectation you would have for, say, an episode of Here’s Lucy, they are perfectly engaging.  As a chapter in Elvis’s career, they are an important step in his development as an artist — that is to say, they gave him twelve years of unbelievably crappy songs to sing so that he could “come back” in 1968.


THE WELL-INTENTIONED GENRE PIECES

Cineasts will say that King Creole, which co-stars Walter Matthau and is directed by Michael Curtiz, qualifies as a “good” Elvis Presley movie.  But they are wrong.  King Creole is a middling noir which, for some reason, stars Elvis Presley.  Elvis tried to make a number of “real” movies, that is, movies that “just happened” to star Elvis Presley.  These include Love Me Tender, a Civil War drama, Wild in the Country, a “juvenile delinquent” drama written by Barton Fink himself, Clifford Odets, and Flaming Star, a western drama, starring Elvis as a half-breed, directed by Don Siegel.  It’s impossible to enjoy these movies as genre pieces because, well, because Elvis Presley is in them.  He’s not believable as a cowhand, a half-breed or a down-on-his-luck kid.  First, he’s not a very talented actor, second, he throws off charisma like a 1,000,000-watt lightbulb, blasting character, plot and every other actor offscreen (or into irrelevance).  So you’ll have a couple of actors sitting around talking, pretending they’re in a “real movie,” and then ELVIS PRESLEY walks in and any sense of watching a “real movie” goes right out the window.  It doesn’t get any better when he starts singing; there’s no reason why these movies would need to have singing in them at all (they were all developed as dramas — King Creole was originally about a boxer who gets into trouble with the mob [that is to say, it was originally a boxing movie]) –songs were shoehorned into existing scripts and it shows.

Of these four, King Creole has the best songs — that is, real Elvis Presley songs, not cringe-inducing novelty numbers (which sprout in abundance later, as we will see).  The title song is a smash and the movie also includes “Hard Headed Woman, “Trouble” and “Crawfish.”


THE CREAM OF THE CROP

This is it.  This is the best Hollywood could do.  These three movies have it all.  Elvis plays someone very much like himself, so there isn’t that awkward Elvis/reality schism.  He sings, all-in-all, wonderful songs opposite real actors.  He explodes off the screen.  He is sexy, hot-headed, dynamic, graceful and bursting with energy.  The direction and editing have zazz and pluck.  In Viva Las Vegas, he even stars opposite a woman who can hold the screen with him.  They are superlative entertainments and, more importantly, they are excellent showcases for Elvis’s talent.  Viva Las Vegas also gets a gold star for being the one “Elvis Movie” that shows that the whole idea of an “Elvis Movie” can work as entertainment.

By “Elvis Movie” I’m speaking of a classically stupid, unbelievable, nonsensical concept that exists simply as an excuse for Elvis to sing, do something “exciting” (usually in front of obvious rear-screen projection) and kiss pretty girls.  In the case of Viva, for instance, Elvis is a singing race-car driver who has to choose between wooing Ann-Margret and winning the big race.  See?  You wouldn’t go to see that movie.  That’s a stupid idea for a movie.  It is, in fact, a retarded idea for a movie.  Imagine, if you will, George Clooney starring as a singing race-car driver who must choose between wooing Ann-Margret and winning the big race.  You couldn’t get that movie made today.  But it makes perfect sense as an Elvis Presley movie and is the model for the genre.  The soundtrack also includes “You’re the Boss,” a number cut from the movie, that sounds astonishingly like Elvis singing on a Tom Waits record.


THE BIG-BUDGET ELVIS MOVIES

These movies are all professionally made, make no sense, are produced by Hal Wallis, made money and do what they’re supposed to do.  I hate them.  They are boring, pedestrian, and exist to make Elvis Presley “safe” for middle-class America.

There is a thing that happens in Elvis movies, where the composers can’t be bothered to come up with an original song so they re-purpose a copyright-free song and write new words to it.  In Blue Hawaii it’s “Alouetta.”  In another one it’s “Three Blind Mice.”

Girls! Girls! Girls! features “Song of the Shrimp,” where Elvis sings the tale of a shrimp who longs to climb aboard a shrimp boat to see the legendary land of Louisiana.  All four of these movies include lullabies, and/or songs sung to mothers.


MY PERSONAL FAVORITES


You always love your retarded children more than the others.  Producers other than Hal Wallis discovered that you could make more money with a cheap Elvis movie than you could with an expensive Elvis movie.  And this accounts for the bulk of the Elvis filmography, what I like to think of as the “real” Elvis movies.  They have the texture of Formica, the depth of cellophane and the complexity of a gallon of buttermilk.  They don’t feel like movies at all, they feel like episodic television.  This week on Elvis, Elvis is caught behind the Iron Curtain and must match wits with batty spies in order to get to his big singing gig!  They are uniformly genial, sporadically charming and cinematically dead on arrival.

In each one Elvis plays a singing racecar-driver/speedboat-driver/cliff-diver/helicopter-pilot/boxer/hillbilly who has to win the race or win the big fight or solve the mystery.  In Tickle Me he has to hunt for buried treasure in an abandoned western town which may or may not be haunted.  Four decades of Scooby-Doo adventures have robbed this movie of much of its surprise.

Novelty songs abound, and I pretty much adore every song from every one of these movies.  Girl Happy has the best of them, a charming number called “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce.” (yes, you read that right.)  Paradise Hawaiian Style features “A Dog’s Life,” which is sung to, who else, a helicopter full of dogs, and also “Queenie Wahini’s Papaya.”  Fun in Aculpulco has “No Room to Rhumba in a Sportscar.”  Tickle Me, the cheapest of the movies, actually benefits from not having any “new” songs for Elvis to sing.  Instead, he gets to sing some actual blues numbers from his post-army years, and one is actually reminded for a moment that he is one of the most significant American talents of all time.

It Happened at the World’s Fair includes a cameo by the young Kurt Russell, who plays a snot-nosed brat who kicks Elvis in the shin.  It also contains the only intentionally funny joke in the Elvis filmography: Elvis walks down a street by himself, flips through his “little black book,” looking up a girl who lives nearby.  He finds her name and recites “Mary.  Hmm.  36-24 — pause — Maple Street.”  He then cocks his eyebrows and moves on.

Clambake holds a special place in my heart.  It represents what may possibly be the nadir of Elvis’s personal life.  He had put on thirty pounds or so, was taking spiritual advice from his barber, and had cracked his head open on a sink the night before shooting began during one of his adventures in pharmacology.  As a result, his hair is combed into permanent, shellacked bangs and the belted leisure suits he wears make him look like Ubu Roi.  It also features the worst song, bar none, of his career, a “High Hopes” knockoff called “Confidence,” which he sings to a playground full of kids.  Now, keep in mind that, ten years earlier, Elvis Presley was enraging parents, scandalizing censors and making teenage girls go weak in the knees.  Now he’s singing to children about building confidence.  It’s an obscenity.  I love it.


THE ALSO RANS

What does it say about a movie when it just isn’t quite as good as a low-budget Elvis movie?  And yet, these movies, for whatever reason, don’t make the cut.  Easy Come, Easy Go, in spite of being a Hal Wallis production, is a stupefying atrocity, where Elvis, no kidding, plays a singing scuba diver who must battle evil hippies in order to find sunken treasure.  Live a Little, Love a Little is a Mad Ave comedy that co-stars Rudy Vallee and features a “psychedelic” number, “Edge of Reality,” where Elvis sings to a man in a Great Dane costume.  Frankie and Johnny is a period piece which should, theoretically, give Elvis a chance to explore the roots of his music, but which does not.


MUST TO AVOID

Harum Scarum isn’t just a bad Elvis movie, it’s one of the worst movies ever made by anyone.  Agonizingly boring, impossible to sit through, full of crappy songs, cheap sets, bored actors, nonexistent editing and uninspired writing and direction.  Stay Away, Joe, in addition to having perhaps the worst title of any Elvis movie (they might as well have called it Stay Away, Audience), features Elvis, I could not invent this, singing a song to an impotent bull.

THE LATE EXPERIMENTS

Late in his film career, Elvis abruptly stopped making “Elvis Movies” and returned to trying to make “real” movies.  Charro! is a Clint Eastwood western without songs, The Trouble With Girls is a bizarre, unwieldly, Altmanesque portrait of life on the Chatauqua circuit circa 1929, and Change of Habit is an urban “problem drama” with Elvis starring as a ghetto doctor who falls in love with a nun.  The nun (Mary Tyler Moore) must choose between Jesus and Elvis.

They all suck, although Change of Habit does hold the viewer in a certain stateof ghastly fascination.
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