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SPECTACULAR, SURE, BUT BIOPIC FAILS TO CAPTURE THE ESSENCE OF ELVIS
ELVIS (M)
Director: Baz Luhrmann
(The Great Gatsby)
Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia Dejonge, Richard Roxburgh.
Rating:
A blue suede snooze
We’re caught in a trap. Can’t walk out. Because it is a Baz Luhrmann movie, baby.
So even if you attend the new blockbuster biopic Elvis without a Suspicious Mind, be assured you have booked yourself a 2½-hour stay at the Heartbreak Hotel.
Unfortunately, in this case, the right subject for a jukebox musical has been flunked by the wrong filmmaker for the job.
The sequin-studded switches and twitches in style that have served Luhrmann so well in the past in movies like Moulin Rouge are now conspiring against him.
All that sparkle and all those spinning baubles certainly catch the eye, but capture little of the essence of Elvis Presley.
The overall effect of this $250m production is not unlike a three-way collision between a parade float, an ice-cream truck and a limo stuffed with glitter.
Elvis botches what should have been a simple, crowd-pleasing assignment on two crucial fronts.
Firstly, as a portrait of Presley, Luhrmann and his team colour way outside the lines of a conventional understanding of the man.
Secondly, as a showcase for the subject’s substantial body of work as a singer, the movie rarely lets Presley’s unfiltered and instinctive vocal genius off the leash for very long.
Initially, we get a front-row seat as the atomic talent of Tupelo-born,
Memphis-raised poor boy Elvis Presley (played adeptly enough by relative unknown Austin Butler) is detonated inside a docile 1950s.
A predatory carny named Colonel Tom Parker (a bizarre Tom Hanks in a big fat-suit, who also narrates the entire movie in a bad Dutch accent) sees all the dollar signs ahead, and becomes the manipulative manager of the global sensation.
Suddenly, it is the late 1960s, and Presley reclaims back his coolness after too many terrible Hollywood movies with a radical change of sound and image.
The end result is the triumphant 1968 TV broadcast known as The NBC Comeback Special.
Finally, the movie slows down and proceeds respectfully towards Presley’s final years in the 1970s, as too many Las Vegas shows and a destructive dependency on drugs hand him a one-way ticket to an early death at the age of just 42.
As miserable as it is to be a party to a jowly, jump-suited Presley, firing handguns into TV sets in his Vegas rooftop penthouse, it is only here that the movie final forges an emotional connection with the viewer.
The pay-off is the production’s one truly moving and memorable scene: a spine-tingling re-enactment of Presley’s final live performance, just weeks before his passing.
An utterly haunting rendition of the standard Unchained Melody –
with the King accompanying himself, playing a rolling piano arrangement that sounds like the start of a death spiral – goes to an all too lonely, all too desolate, all too human place that the real Elvis Presley must have known all too well.
If only the movie bearing his name could have made the effort to try and find him there.
Elvis is in cinemas now
MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU (PG) Rating: General release
Those diminutive yellow mischiefmakers the Minions are back on the big screen where they belong, courtesy of an origin story for their old pal Gru. Actually, in this case, that should be their young pal Gru.
For this new movie is set smackbang in the middle of the 1970s, when Gru was just another 11-year-old aspiring supervillain daydreaming of wicked world domination.
As the story begins, Gru is still attending primary school in San Francisco, but is already the selfappointed mastermind of the many Minions holed up in his basement.
However, Gru (voiced as usual by Steve Carell, though pitch-shifted up an octave) is actively considering dumping his little henchmen helpers to claim junior membership in the infamous crime gang known as the Vicious 6.
There is a vacancy within this nogood bunch now that their ageing leader Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin) has been deposed in favour of the younger, hungrier and angrier Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson).
Among the bad dudes and dudesses acting on Belle’s sinister say-so are the likes of Svengeance (Dolph Lundgren), Jean Clawed (who else but Jean-claude van Damme?) and Nunchuck (Lucy Lawless as, yes, a nun armed with nunchucks).
To be frank, the business concerning Gru’s journey to independent supervillainry is not the real reason the movie’s target audience will be showing up in droves. All that any of the many million Minion superfans want to see is their irrepressibly silly and endearing idols doing what comes naturally.
The anarchic nonsense of the Minions’ antics remains as endearing and amusing as it ever has been.
LOST ILLUSIONS (M) Rating: Selected cinemas
Sumptuous, sensual and sort-of offits-rocker, this lavish costume drama goes out to anyone who loves their French movies to be as French as possible in look, mood and attitude at all times.
Little wonder, then, that this relatively faithful adaptation of the epic novel by Balzac scooped the pool at the recent Cesars (France’s equivalent of the Oscars). Benjamin Voisin (poised for global stardom after his work here) stars as Lucien, a struggling poet from the middle of nowhere whose seduction of an aristocrat’s wife forces a change of address to Paris.
Life in the big smoke comes with lessons about love, words and personal ethics that an impressionable young fellow like Lucien may not be ready to learn. Until it is too late. If you’re looking to lose yourself in an esoteric morality tale that is both easy on the eyes and hard on the head, then Lost Illusions means your search is over.
While the stately pacing and an unusual reliance on voiceover narration may not be to everyone’s taste, there is a substance to match the style that holds a strong connection throughout. Co-stars Cecile de France and Xavier Dolan.