Tom Parker (Tom Hanks in what is easily the most loathsome and least sympathetic performance he has ever given, and I mean that as a compliment), the carnival barker who treated his naïve wunderkind as a sideshow attraction right until the end. The actual devil in disguise was of course Col. In a time when our current politically conservative leaders have arbitrarily and almost randomly declared war on drag queens, it’s not so absurd that America’s cultural leaders would look upon a man like Presley with, well, the devil in disguise. Elvis is also refreshingly blunt about why Elvis’ early years were so controversial, namely that, yes, white adults were appalled that their white children were shaking, rattling and rolling to what was seen as “negro music” in a white man’s personage, a wolf in sheep’s clothing if you will. It offers an ironic portrait of a poor young man raised alongside Black neighbors who became a superstar by being a white man who sang and danced like a Black man. The film makes zero bones about from where Elvis’s musical stylings and infamous shakes and thrusts came.
It’s a classic tale of a man undone by the monster who made him, whereby the king (one with roots, origins and sympathies rooted in Black experience) becomes a metaphorical slave to his duplicitous white “master.”
That’s at least partially because the story is in sync with Luhrmann’s prior spectacles, offering a rock opera (or rock kabuki?) that (like Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby) matches the razzle-dazzle with a grand tragedy exposing the rotting cubic zirconium underneath. It is a glorified 2.5-hour music video or trailer that miraculously manages to tell a story rooted in character amid its relentless montages and pinball editing. The cradle-to-grave biopic of the unofficial king of rock and roll is a whirlwind of audio/visual wonder.
The 15th edition is April 17-21.Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is an unusually on-point match-up of filmmaker and material. Ebert in 1998 to create Ebertfest, an annual showcase of movies he deemed unjustly overlooked. Loyalty to his birthplace and alma mater led Mr.
Elvis ebert movie#
Ebert began his career as the Chicago Sun-Times movie critic in 1967, three years after graduating from his hometown University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ebert's online efforts earned him a Webby Person of the Year award in 2010. His Twitter account attracted more than 837,000 followers and his blog through the Sun-Times site is one of the world's most referenced movie sites. Ebert became one of the Internet's loudest voices advocating cinema and, at times, social and political action. I believe being forced to turn to writing as my best form of communication may have awakened latent abilities."Īnd also inspired new ones. I didn't 'try' to remember things, but found that they well up during the act of writing. "The form of a memoir has sent me searching within, where I have been surprised that so many memories reside even after being untouched for many years. I broached the notion to him in an August 2011 email and received this reply:
His candor about dealing with his alcoholism and illness without self-pity, the intimate reveries and gracious spreading of credit for his success, came from a place beyond the daily reporting grind. Ebert with a new sense of freedom in writing. Reading Life Itself suggests that losing his voice may have provided Mr.
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