8/10/22 - Elvis (2022) - 5+/10

It doesn’t hide its intent nor its illustration from minute one, it is bold in your face and loud in your ears. I respect Luhrman’s courage of his convictions, but that didn’t mean that it was for me or that I enjoyed it. It is an overly long and somewhat dull bombastic affair - cold in the middle and silly at the edges.

Butler does a tremendous job, sounding and expressing the King fittingly, but he is left adrift in a sea of biographical nonsense. It lays itself out like a fairytale and loses us all in the non-verisimilitude. It’s hard to find an expression of genuinity, excited more to blare a LOUD glitzy montage-laiden impression of the moment in its stead. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I found myself adrift in the narrative, it being more intent on audacious than dialoguing a character’s journey.

This isn’t helped by Tom Hanks’ “unique” performance. I have no idea what Col. Parker looked or sounded like, but it is hard to see and hear more than a caricature; a creature more closely aligned with his villain in The Ladykillers than in a reality I can identify with.

I don’t think the anachronistic music inclusion connected with and elevated in the same way it does in Rome+Juliet or Moulin Rouge. In the end, I just found it unengaging beyond the musical interludes.