As a movie viewer and person interested in the topic of Elvis Presley, I feel spoiled that within a year and a half we’ve gotten two really good Elvis movies from two very distinct directors. Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA doesn’t feel at all redundant coming after Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, because the perspective and approach are so different. Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, it follows her from the time she met Elvis until the time she divorced him. Most of that shit Luhrmann had to do montages about is happening off camera while she’s left at Graceland waiting for him. (Also Colonel Parker, the narrator and magical puppet master of Luhrmann’s film, is just a guy on the other side of the phone in Coppola’s.)
Cailee Spaeny (young Lynn Cheney, VICE) plays Priscilla Beaulieu, 14-year-old American girl just minding her own business in a diner on the military base in Germany where her stepfather (Ari Cohen, BRUISER, IT, MOLLY’S GAME) is stationed when a soldier named Terry West (Luke Humphrey, John Bobbit in I WAS LORENA BOBBITT) introduces himself. He says he arranges the music on the base so he’s friends with Elvis, and he could introduce her to him because Elvis misses home and likes to meet other Americans. It takes some doing, but he convinces stepdad and mom (Dagmara Dominczyk, BOTTOMS) to let the kid go to a party. (read the rest of this shit…)
Any musician biopic, pretty much, is gonna be a legend or a tall tale. What’s great about Baz Luhrmann directing one is that his entire style leans into that. Condensing a whole life and career into an entertaining 2 1/2 hours requires shortcuts, cheats and artistic license that prevent it from being literally true, so here we have a director whose work is rarely about the literal truth anyway. It’s more about how something feels and looks and sounds, or making it look and sound like it feels. Biopics depend on montages to move quickly across time, and this guy speaks fluent montage. He’s also a director whose films have generally been on the verge of being jukebox musicals (going all the way in the case of MOULIN ROUGE!). So what could be more perfect for him than an Elvis Presley biopic?
FLAMING STAR is a Don Siegel western about a mixed-race family – a white man, his white son, his Native American wife, and their son together, Pacer. They all get it from both sides but especially Pacer, who has one foot in each world. The whites won’t even speak to him after a Kiowa massacre of a white family, and at the same time he’s being pressured by the new chief to turn his back on the white man and become a Kiowa warrior. Not like the chief gives two shits about him, he just wants him for the propaganda value, to be able to show somebody who turned their back on the white man. But Pacer doesn’t want to do it and thinks they’ll kill him when he says no.
