"After watching the movie, Elvis' widow told me the most exciting thing I've ever heard in my life."
Just before its conclusion, the Cannes Film Festival presented the fresh film and it is about Elvis Presley.
The result is invested and comprehensive, but also superficial and flashy.
Director Buzz Lorman, this review is not interesting - "Priscilla Presley was moved by the film, and that's all that matters to me."
And also: the Iranian film that turned out to be a masterpiece
Avner Shavit, Cannes
27/05/2022
Friday, 27 May 2022, 00:14
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Trailer for the movie "Elvis" (Tulip Media)
The huge success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" gave the signal for a wave of cinematic biographies of musical idols - for example "Respect" on Aretha Franklin and "Rocketman" on Elton John, which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival three years ago.
Now comes "Elvis", which also premiered on the Riviera.
The film, presumably, is about Elvis Presley, who in one of the scenes foretells in melancholy that he will leave no legacy behind, and this of course turned out to be a false prophecy, to say the least.
He left behind a vast, extraordinary and eternal legacy, which among other things also greatly influenced cinema.
There have already been a slew of films that have dealt with Elvis, his legacy, his fans and imitators - and also himself, for example a rather forgotten film from the late 1970s, in which Kurt Russell played him.
"Elvis," which spans 140 minutes, is the director's most comprehensive and bombastic film biography to date.
Behind her is Buzz Lorman, the director who has signed a variety of grandiose works, including "Moulin Rouge" and most recently "The Great Gatsby."
The lead role stars Austin Butler, in what should be his breakout role, and alongside him is Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, the musician's cunning promoter.
The film will be released worldwide and in Israel in late June.
We will wait with the full review until then, and in the meantime we will settle for a few short impressions.
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To the full article
The most comprehensive film ever made about his character.
From "Elvis" (Photo: Tulip Media)
The film reviews Elvis' life from birth to death, but throughout the timeline remains focused around several axes.
One axis is political-socio-cultural - the script shows the work of the musical idol in the context of the cultural war in the United States and the struggle for civil rights.
He describes how this white man grew up on the knees of black gospel music and brought it to the mainstream and how his kneecaps kicked in the ass of conservative America, all against the backdrop of the historic upheavals around him.
In one scene, Elvis protests to Parker that they did not respond to the murder of Martin Luther King.
In another scene, the film compresses together the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the murder of Sharon Tate and the horrific incident in a Rolling Stones performance during which four of her fans were killed.
All of this adds a bit of sting and interest to the result, but in the end it remains pretty superficial.
On top of that, no less than it's a movie about Elvis, it's a movie about his promoter, a coward who will maneuver Elvis to produce as many golden eggs as possible.
Because of the casting of a sympathetic actor like Tom Hanks, I had an expectation that Lorman would build the promoter as a complex character and might even try to understand her, but not so.
The colonel stands as the arch-villain of the film.
"Parker was a charming man, illuminating every room he entered," Hanks said at the film's official press conference, which took place on the Riviera after the screening - in front of a hall full of journalists from all over the world, and in a good and cordial atmosphere.
"Everything he did, he does with pleasure - including his scams."
"I was not interested in playing a bad guy in the style of James Bond movies, the kind that comes up and says 'Mr Bond, before I kill you, do you want to do a tour of the house?'" Hanks added to the laughter of the audience.
"It's okay, I understand that style, but he did not fit in here. What interested me about the character was something else: he realized that Elvis is a one-time talent, and that he has a chance to turn it into a cultural force. He perceived it the first time he saw an impact. "Elvis has an audience. He understood that Elvis is the forbidden fruit, and that he can make a lot of money from this forbidden fruit."
Made the audience burst out laughing.
Tom Hanks at Cannes (Photo: GettyImages, Lionel Hahn)
Using Parker's point of view, the film also attempts to answer the question the world has been asking for about fifty years - what led to the idol's untimely death, at the age of 42. We'll leave the answer to you to discover for yourself in about a month.
In the meantime, as a summary, I will say that for me at least, "Elvis" is not such a successful film.
Elvis sings "Love My Tender".
This movie does the opposite.
It does not have a drop of softness.
He constantly presses all the buttons at once.
Everything in it is loud and bouncy.
All the while he compresses as many plot details, references and contexts as possible, like a person trying to cram several foods into one mouth at a time instead of chewing each one separately.
This film swallows, does not chew, and as it develops it also becomes more superficial and more predictable, and Elvis leaves the building just before the building collapses from too many clichés.
So far, most of the reviews on the film are more positive than mine, but not out of place.
The Lorman, one way or another, it's that less interesting.
At the press conference he made it clear that he prefers to invest his energies in Elvis' family - his widow Priscilla Presley, his daughter Lisa Marie Presley and his granddaughter, actress Riley Kiao, who just happened to present her first film as a director this year, "War Poney".
Priscilla Presley (left) with Olivier Di-Young who plays her in her youth in the film (Photo: GettyImages, Lionel Hahn)
"Critical people do their job. Some better, some less good," he said.
"I appreciate them, if they do their homework. In this case, no review can be more important than that of the woman who was married to Elvis. I can not describe how excited I was when she went to see the film for the first time."
"After Priscilla finished watching the movie, she wrote to me 'I was not ready for this. Austin is not playing Elvis, it's himself. If my husband was here today, he would look at him and ask -' How dare you? '"
"Priscilla told me the most exciting thing I've ever heard - Elvis left behind children and left behind grandchildren, and thanks to this film, now there's something that embodies the truth of the person he was."
As Lorman pointed out, Priscilla Presley's opinion is more important than ours, but I also want to point out something: Elvis' widow is also a character in the film, played by Olivier Di-Young,
Will "Elvis" fulfill the hopes planted in it and recreate the achievements of "Bohemian Rhapsody"?
It's hard for me to believe.
On the other hand, I'm the one who wrote that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a "forgotten movie," and we all know what happened, so apparently my predictions are equal to those of Elvis himself.
The main thing she loved.
Priscilla Presley in Cannes (Photo: GettyImages, Pascal La Sergeant)
And Elvis is not alone: the festival also premiered a new film about David Bowie at a world premiere.
It is also grandiose, it is also long (140), but in this case it is a documentary project.
The film is called "Moonage Daydream", as the name of Bowie's poem, and is backed by Brett Morgan, who has previously created a docu on Kurt Cobain.
In this case, the result is an audio-visual collage that includes excerpts from live performances;
Images related to the musician's sources of inspiration, the period in which he lived and his heritage, and especially many archival footage of interviews with him, and recordings in which he reflects on his life and explains his teachings.
disappointing.
From "Moonage Daydream" (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)
God forbid I provoke the wrath of Bowie's followers, but at least according to the passages that Morgan chose, he was a lot of things but not a great, eloquent and brilliant thinker.
At one point, the idol explains why he dislikes the bear's mouth, but at best his booing sounds sound like they came out of AA Milne's book.
Sometimes it's even embarrassing.
The Iranian bomb
On Saturday, the festival will come to an end with the awards ceremony in the official competition.
The jury chaired by the French French actor Vincent Landon will announce the winners in the various categories, led by the Golden Palm.
It was not a particularly strong competition this year, but just before it ended, I found yesterday (Thursday) the best film screened in it.
If it was up to him, he would get the palm.
Masterpiece.
From "Leila's Brothers" (Photo: Cannes Film Festival)
This is "Leila's Brothers", a film by Iranian director Said Rostai.
The film is called an Iranian woman who tries to save her brother from themselves, but fails.
The siblings, as well as their parents, prefer to focus on failed financial deals and silly games of honor that will bring them to a financial and emotional collapse.
The film lasts almost three hours, but time flies by.
It has a lot of talk, but also an impressive cinematic expression.
It is sweeping, touching, empathetic and tear-jerking.
Rostai places the events in a very specific context, and among other things describes how the sanctions on Iran following the nuclear program hit the pockets of the citizens, but most of the plot is completely universal and one can easily imagine this drama in every city in Israel.
It's just that if it was an Israeli film and not an Iranian one, then we would have categorized it with typical racism as a "borax film."
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Elvis Presley
David Bowie
Cannes Film Festival
Tom Hanks
Priscilla Presley
