Elvis: Baz at his best will rock Oscars
I think the 30-year-old American actor Austin Butler, aka Luhrmann’s Elvis, will win best actor at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Elvis (M)
In cinemas from June 23
★★★★½
There’s a flaw in Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular musical biopic Elvis that can be blamed only on God or DNA. To quote my 80-year-old mother, who as a girl sent a love letter to Elvis Presley, as did thousands of others, “He’s even better looking than Elvis!”
The exclamation mark is hers. I’ll add my own: he can also sing like mad and act like hell! It’s an early call but I think the 30-year-old American actor Austin Butler, aka Luhrmann’s Elvis, will win best actor at the 2023 Academy Awards.
I also think this movie about the Tupelo, Mississippi-born King of Rock and Roll, filmed in Queensland, is Luhrmann’s best chance to win an Oscar as best director.
The Sydney-born filmmaker arguably is Australia’s most commercially successful director. This film, his sixth, is pitched to an American audience but, like Elvis himself, it has global pizzazz.
When it comes to God or DNA, Elvis’s mother Gladys (the Australian actor Helen Thomson, who is tremendous) is on the former’s side. “The way you sing is God-given, so there can’t be nothing wrong with it.”
Others, from the US Senate down, disagree, wanting to ban and/or jail “Elvis the Pelvis”, a skinny white boy in a pink suit daring to amalgamate segregated black music.
And then there’s Colonel Tom Parker (dual Oscar winner Tom Hanks), who sees both sides of the equation and works out which one will earn him the most cash.
“Now, I don’t know nothing about music, but I could see it in that girl’s eyes,’’ the cigar-chomping carnival huckster says as he watches young women watch Elvis wiggle his hips.
“She has the taste of forbidden fruit. She could have eaten him alive. He was my destiny.”
Parker, Elvis’s controversial and complicated manager, is the main narrator of this story, which is an interesting decision. Hanks’s performance is nuanced, as is Luhrmann’s direction and script (which he co-wrote).
Parker, a gambling addict, is not a good guy but nor is he a cardboard cut-out bad guy. “We are the same, you and I,’’ he tells Elvis in an oddly tender moment. “We are two odd, lonely children, reaching for eternity.”
Butler sings most of Elvis’s songs himself and when he hits the stage it’s enough to make a dead person’s pulse rise. The filming here (Australian cinematographer Mandy Walker) is outstanding. The faces of the audience – especially the women – tell the story better than words can.
Butler did extensive voice coaching and studied footage of Elvis.
All of the know-by-heart songs, such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog, are sung with intense emotion and physicality.
This extends to the quieter moments, off the stage, as Elvis deals with various demons. “There’s a lot of people saying a lot of things,’’ he says. “But in the end you got to listen to yourself.”
The costume and production design, by Oscar winner Catherine Martin, the director’s partner in life and art, are characters in their own right, such as when Elvis, with the vice-squad looking on, climbs onto an outdoor stage, ripples his tight black leathers and sings Trouble.
“If you’re looking for trouble/ You came to the right place … I don’t take no orders/ From no kind of man.”
Luhrmann and the Australian musical director Elliott Wheeler also choose the right background songs as the drama develops in Elvis’s life and outside of it. As news headlines report the rise of The Beatles, the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King, we hear Edge of Reality.
There is a host of Australian actors in the cast, including the impressive Olivia DeJonge as Elvis’s wife Priscilla Presley and Richard Roxburgh as Elvis’s father and hapless business manager Vernon Presley. David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Kate Mulvany also have roles.
As the director noted at the Sydney premiere, the idea that “every single frame” of this movie could be shot in Australia would have seemed unbelievable not so long ago.
There is also a knockout cameo by Alton Mason as Little Richard belting out Tutti Frutti and a longer performance by Kelvin Harrison Jnr as a wise BB King.
Luhrmann’s previous films are Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, which was nominated for an Oscar, Australia and The Great Gatsby. Martin won Oscars for production design and costume design for Moulin Rogue! and Gatsby.
I think Elvis could be a little shorter than 159-minutes but that’s a minor quibble. It rocks and rolls from start to finish, is spectacularly shot and has an amazing lead performance that reminds me of Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, for which we won an Oscar.
As mentioned, Butler sings most of the songs. Towards the end, when Elvis is overweight and messed up on drugs, Elvis’s own voice is used as well. His final scene, singing at a piano because he cannot stand, is sad and beautiful.
Yet that time was to come. When one politically powerful white man claps eyes on the gyrating young Elvis, he asks, “What in God’s sweet name am I looking at?” This remarkable movie suggests one possible answer is the future, in more ways than one.
-
Jurassic World Dominion (M)
In cinemas
★★★
I saw a cartoon the other day in which a group of cavemen are painting on a cave wall. One of them looks to the cave entrance and sees a carnivorous dinosaur peeking inside. “I think,’’ he tells his cave mates, “I’ve spotted an anachronism.”
That’s the sort of line the ever-watchable Jeff Goldblum, aka Dr Ian Malcolm, might use in Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth movie in the we’re-not-extinct-yet franchise.
That still-extant distinction applies to the dinosaurs and the humans. This movie is also a reunion of Goldblum, who likes to joke with the audience, with Sam Neill and Laura Dern, who starred in the original Jurassic Park back in 1993.
“This is so trippy,’’ Dr Malcolm says when he reacquaints himself with Dr Ellie Sattler (Dern) and Dr Alan Grant (Neill). Less than 65 million years ago, they all worked at that prehistoric theme park that went wrong.
That first movie, based on a 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, was directed by Steven Spielberg, who remains involved with the franchise as an executive producer.
Whether it’s due to him or not, the best bits of this 159-minute movie, directed and co-written by Colin Trevorrow in his third outing for the series, have a Spielberg feel about them.
A chase sequence through narrow streets, with one-time velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) on a motorbike with two fleet-footed raptors in pursuit, is thrilling.
Other scenes in which dinosaurs confront humans, on land, air and water, are equally exciting. The animatronics, CGI and cinematography (John Schwarzman in his second movie for the franchise) are first-rate.
This film is a sequel to its 2018 predecessor Jurassic World Fallen. It’s a handful of years later and humans and dinosaurs now share the planet. This is well explained in a slick opening sequence.
As the word dominion suggests, the question is, can they live together or does one have to survive at the expense of the other? As Dr Goldblum puts it, in his sardonic way, “It is always darkest just before eternal nothingness”.
There’s a black market in dinosaurs, which is partly explained in a good scene that nods to the Star Wars cantina. Dinosaur pit fights are popular. What’s not explained is why anyone would want a brontosaurus in their back yard.
Above all of this is a company called Biosyn Genetics. It’s no doubt owned by Elon Musk and plans to send T-Rexes to the moon, but on the screen the boss is Dr Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott).
Biosyn – the name may be a bit of a giveaway – runs a dinosaur sanctuary in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. Yet that, it seems, is just a cover to breed prehistoric locusts that will let Dr Dodgson take control of the global food chain.
This movie is an odd mix. As mentioned, the special effects and the cinematography are brilliant. As always, there is a new dinosaur on the patch: Giganotosaurus – a bigger-than T-Rex meat-eater.
However the plot – older dinosaur doctors join newer dinosaur experts to save the world while Neill and Dern decide whether or not to kiss – is not just predictable but deeply corny.
And anyone who knows anything about dinosaurs, as did my teenage co-viewer, will roll their eyes at what some of them do to each other.
I reminded him to remember that it’s just a film and in that context a Therizinosaurus – a herbivore with long but fragile claws – can do what it does.
“This isn’t about us,’’ Dr Grant says at one point. He’s right about that. The reptiles are the stars of this movie. Goldblum aside, it’s hard not to feel that the warm-blooded actors are phoning it in a bit.
