{"id":26396,"date":"2022-12-26T16:39:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-27T00:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=26396"},"modified":"2022-12-26T16:44:12","modified_gmt":"2022-12-27T00:44:12","slug":"%f0%9f%8e%a5-elvis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2022\/12\/26\/%f0%9f%8e%a5-elvis\/","title":{"rendered":"🎥 Elvis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elvis (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️<\/a>: On the one hand, it’s my least favorite of Baz Lurhmann’s projects. On the other hand — I still liked it; even a “least favorite” Baz Luhrmann is still pretty good.<\/p>\n

Pros: As always, the music and the visuals. Within the first five seconds, it’s obvious that this is a Baz Lurhmann film, and it doesn’t let up. I’ll definitely be looking up the soundtrack; as can be expected from one of Baz’s films, there are some really neat blends of Elvis’s songs with contemporary sounds.<\/p>\n

(Admittedly, much of the above could be a con rather than a pro, if Baz’s style doesn’t work as well for you as it does for me.)<\/p>\n

Con: I’m not entirely convinced it really had to be nearly three hours long. As much as I like Baz, that’s a lot<\/em> of Baz to sit through. While it’s not quite his longest \u2014 Australia gets that prize by six minutes \u2014 it is his longest music-focused film. I definitely think he works better when constrained to about two hours or less…or has the space to really make a longer format work, as he did with the TV series The Get Down.<\/p>\n

As I continue to think about this, I wonder if part of why this one didn’t rank as high for me is that part of what I love about Baz’s work is how incredibly good he is at using music as a palette, and taking all sorts of different artists, genres, and styles, blending them, mashing them up, and creating something new.<\/p>\n

Where here, because it was all focused on a singular artist, there wasn’t as much of that. While I enjoy Elvis, the tracks that stood out to me the most and that I’m most interested in finding on the soundtrack were those that combined his music with the blues and country influences and with modern pop beats and rhythms.<\/p>\n

Maybe \u2014\u00a0for me, at least \u2014 focusing on a single artist actually worked against the film, because it didn’t allow Baz to do some of what he does best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My least favorite of Baz Lurhmann’s projects\u2026but even a ‘least favorite’ Baz Luhrmann is still pretty good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2037],"tags":[4234],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}