How long has it been since a movie trailer gave you the chills?
For me, it was last week when the promotion for the June movie release of Elvis came out.
I was all shook up, as it were.
What will get me back in a theatre? This!
It is a biopic in the vein of Rocket Man (Elton John) and Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen) and that’s what has Elvis Presley fans excited.
We have had to endure ridiculous portrayals from the likes of Don Johnson (Elvis and the Beauty Queen), Jonathan Rhys-Myers (Elvis: the Miniseries) and Michael Shannon (Elvis and Nixon).
Bad wigs, stupid dialogue and bad acting. In a word? Cringeworthy.
I had to swallow bottles of Tums during most of them. All were stereotypical and all embarrassing.
Maybe this one can be different.
Baz Luhrmann is an Australian director (Moulin Rouge, Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet) and from what I can glean from the advance publicity, he has done incredible deep-dive research into Elvis’s Mississippi roots, the importance of the church in his upbringing and his performance art, the racial divide, the sexual revolution, and how Elvis found his own path as one of the world’s first International icons.
This story is actually not so much about Elvis as it is about his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and he is a polarizing character.
There are basically two camps.
Either Parker was a genius who introduced Elvis to the masses and made incredible deals for him on TV, movies and in concert. He made him a star.
Or you think he’s an illegal immigrant and conman who took advantage of a naive kid and managed to attach himself to a meteor and make the most of it all for himself. And took 50 per cent.
Maybe, in this case, both things can be true.
What gives fans hope is the fact this movie has put Tom Hanks in the role of The Colonel. He is almost unrecognizable. If Hanks is in it, it has promise, right?
Elvis is played by Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and honestly, I have no clue about his acting chops. To me, he doesn’t look like Elvis, but nobody does. He seems a bit small in stature, but here’s hoping he can capture the energy and the spirit. They are using a mix of his and Elvis’s vocals.
I must have watched the trailer 20 times. There is a lot of detail in there. There is a lot of circus symbolism representing the former occupation of The Colonel as a carnival barker. It looks as if they hit all the highlights, such as Elvis bursting onto the music scene like a lightning bolt, and the movie years, including the 1968 Comeback Special, which came at the same time as Martin Luther King was assassinated in Elvis's hometown of Memphis, Tenn. There's his marriage to Priscilla, the birth of Lisa Marie, the concert years, and the toll it all took.
Perhaps we will see these milestones from the view of the manager and maybe that is rarely considered.
Can I be unbiased? Absolutely not. I would suggest most devoted fans cannot.
Here’s what I am willing to do. I will give the cast the benefit of the doubt to see if they can capture the essence of the characters they are playing.
I will applaud what they get right. I have already seen the Elvis character wearing Band-Aids on his hands in the concert years (he did that to keep fans from pulling the rings off his fingers and cutting him). The hair started out lighter (dark blonde) and moved to jet black as Elvis transformed himself. It's all in the details.
I will remain hopeful that if they got the tiny things right, then maybe they got the bigger story right, too.
This could be an amazing opportunity to introduce Elvis to a new generation of music lovers who maybe don’t know how it all happened. Maybe they don’t know how provocative he was in the early 1950s. How did he get so famous without benefit of the internet? It’s a chance to re-introduce the music.
Elvis has always been cool, but maybe we need to be reminded of his genius. It would be overdue if he got respect.
Did they make this film for fans? Probably not, although, they have involved Priscilla and the Presley estate. The producers seem to be respectful of our devotion, taking to social media to say “we felt a responsibility to get it right.”
They don’t need to add anything extra to what is a true rags-to-riches story. It was all there — the good, the bad and the ugly.
Elvis will be back in the building June 24.
