Tag Archives: Elvis

Feb 17 2026
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Epic”

New fine-tuned Elvis doc reminds us why he’ll always be The King.

EPIC
Starring Elvis Presley
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Rated PG

In IMAX theaters Friday, Feb. 20, and wide release Friday, Feb. 27

Australian director Baz Luhurmann’s 2022 movie Elvis starred Austin Butler as Elvis. This new one upgrades to the real deal: Elvis as Elvis, and more Elvis-y than ever. EPIC stands for Elvis Presley in Concert.

And that’s exactly what it is, and what makes it epic. It’s Elvis in concert like you’ve never seen Elvis before. Using recently unearthed and newly restored performance footage, old Super8 home movies and TV appearances, it’s a masterfully orchestrated immersion into the remarkable, iconic arc of Presley’s unmatched career, using his own words as narration. Much of the speaking—Elvis talking about his childhood, military service, musical influences, movies, fame, singing, his parents and more—comes from previously unreleased archival interviews, which the movie expertly interweaves throughout.  

A lot of the performance footage is from concerts filmed for two previous movies, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972). But now it’s been meticulously cleaned up and sharpened into strikingly vivid detail and definition, re-edited with enhanced audio that replicates what it must have felt like to be there live. It’s a movie you don’t just see and hear, you feel—the explosive chords, the bone-shaking seismic rumble of bass guitar, the percussive wallop of drums. It’s the energy, the excitement, the emotional mojo of watching Elvis so clearly, so up close and personal, curling his lips into that megawatt smile and making you feel like you’re right there with him. 

We also see Elvis in the Army and on The Ed Sullivan Show, where he was famously shown from only the waist up to not unsettle viewers with his pelvic gyrations. (We hear Elvis say music makes him feel like he’s got “ants in my pants.”) We watch as his singing superstardom leads him to Hollywood, where he languished in the doldrums of unchallenging acting roles. (Cue “Edge of Reality,” which he recorded in 1970, and its line about “life’s dream lies disillusioned.”)

And we’re along for the ride as he rehearses, then takes his show to Las Vegas for his triumphant musical comeback after all those cheesy films. Over the course of 90 minutes, we see or hear bits of some 75 songs, and some in their entirety, from “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Don’t Be Cruel” to “In the Ghetto,” “Polk Salad Annie” and “I Shall Be Released.” You’ll hear Elvis put his own spin on Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and the Righteous Brothers. It’s jam-packed, start to finish, with music.

We see women wailing, swooning, rushing the stage, grabbing, trying to wrangle a kiss or rip away a piece of his high-collared jumpsuit. We see his manager, Col. Tom Parker, whose dubious machinations kept Elvis from touring internationally, working at a feverish pace, and likely cut him out of money he should have received (cue “Devil in Disguise”). We see Elvis joshing with his backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations, and at home with wife Priscilla and their daughter, Lisa Marie. We learn how he winds down after the hormonal surge of a show by singing old gospel songs for hours with his backup quartet, the Jordanaires.   

But mostly we get Elvis being Elvis, singing, sopping wet with flop sweat, whipping and karate-kicking up a storm on stage, moving like he’s goosed with electrical current, grooving, teasing, pleasing, playing the audience like a showroom-sized instrument, building them up, calming them down, leaving them breathless at the end. “You started to rev it up,” Sammy Davis Jr. tells him after a show, “and it never stopped!”

For legions of Elvis fans, indeed, it’s never stopped.  He’s been gone now for almost 50 years, but this fine-tuned virtuoso documentary, this glossy and glorified salute, reminds everyone anew why he’ll always be The King.

—Neil Pond

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Nov 02 2023
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Love Me Tender

‘Priscilla’ tells a melancholy tale of the little girl who married a king

Priscilla
Starring Cailee Spaeny & Jacob Elordi
Directed by Sofia Coppola
PG-13

In wide theatrical release Friday, Nov. 3

Like the B-side to a smash hit record, Priscilla flips the familiar Elvis Presley story to put the focus on someone other than Elvis. Cailee Spaneny (most recently seen in HBO’s murder mystery Mare of Easttown) is a revelation as the young Army brat who meets Presley when she’s only 14. (“Just a baby,” he tells her, almost admiringly, when she reveals to him her age.) Euphoria hunk Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, early in his ascent to the top of the world as he begins to woo the wide-eyed 9th grader while still a G.I. stationed overseas in Germany, then finishing his military service and skirting her away to Graceland, his Memphis mansion.

As she’s done in other films (like Marie Antionette, Lost in Translation and The Beguiled), director Sofia Coppola explores the experience of another young woman in an off-balance power dynamic. It’s a curious (and yes, admittedly creepy) relationship as Priscilla is swept away by the singing superstar, 24 at the time, only to become increasingly dissatisfied as a virtual captive in his castle. At six-foot-five, Elordi is considerably taller than Presley was, and his Elvis literally towers over the diminutive Spaeny, more than a foot shorter; their scenes together make a striking visual metaphor for the disparity of a grown, worldly adult man with an adolescent plucked from the nest of home, family and familiarity.

Priscilla is an arty, elegant film, a moody, often melancholy exploration of the girl who left her initially skeptical parents and eventually became Presley’s wife in 1967, when she was 22. (It’s based on Priscilla’s own 1985 memoir, Elvis & Me.) We’re transfixed as young Priscilla settles into her new habitat, a garishly ornate, male-dominated kingdom of sycophantic hangers-on, frenzied fans and a pill-popping husband who introduces her to drugs and tries to groom her into his expectations. Elvis is a control freak who chooses her clothes, dictates her makeup and hair style, and forbids her to accompany him on tour or movie sets. “Keep the home fires burning,” he tells her, while Priscilla comes to suspect he’s carrying on affairs with his Hollywood costars—like Swedish bombshell Ann-Margaret and Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s daughter—and possibly other women as well.

Elvis also has a mean, petulant, unpredictable streak; “I’ve got my mother’s temper,” he tells her after impulsively hurling a chair her way, missing her head by inches. And he has, um, intimacy issues in the bedroom.

As Pricilla’s rock and roll fantasy unravels (leading to their divorce in 1973), we come to see that Elvis and ‘Cilla have something in common; they’re both prisoners. He’s shackled to his fame, while she’s his bird kept in a gilded cage, a little girl lost in a dream, staring wistfully out Graceland’s windows to see what’s on the other side. Priscilla is her story, certainly, but it also surely chips away at the fabled mythology of the complicated superstar with whom she spent more than a decade of her young life.

—Neil Pond

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Sep 04 2014
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Return to Sender

Elvis-tinged parable of twins is bland exercise in make-believe

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The Identical

Starring Blake Rayne, Ray Liotta & Ashley Judd

Directed by Dustin Marcellino

Rated PG

The movie or its marketing materials don’t say it, so I will: The Identical is the strangest Elvis movie not about Elvis you’ll likely ever see.

It’s about a young man who grows up in the South, unaware that he has a twin brother who’ll grow up to become a hip-shakin’ singing sensation—just like Elvis. The young man shares his twin’s musical talent, his Elvis-y stage moves, his Elvis-y looks, and he even gets hired as an impersonator, becoming famous as the best Elvis-y copycat in the business.

But The Identical only makes one fleeting reference to Elvis. Instead, it pretends its characters exist independently, in a bubble, but parallel to real events and real people, including Elvis. It all makes for a curious, weirdly weightless little exercise in make-believe—especially since the movie make-believes it’s not about Elvis. (The movie doesn’t have any rights to actual Elvis music, or anything else “Elvis”—because those things cost a lot of money.)

Elvis actually had a twin brother who did not survive childbirth. What might have happened, though, had Presley’s twin lived? Perhaps something like this, The Identical suggests.

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Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd

A poor couple in Depression-wracked Alabama gives birth to twin boys, but can’t afford to raise them both. So they give away one to a traveling evangelist (Ray Liotta) and his wife (Ashley Judd), swearing them to lifelong secrecy. Then they stage a mock funeral, burying an empty shoebox behind their ramshackle house, so the neighbors won’t question why the infant is no longer around.

The years pass. Newcomer Blake Rayne (a former Elvis impersonator—for real!), making his acting debut, plays both the preacher’s kid, Ryan Wade, as well as the pop-rock sensation Drexel Hemsley, although Drexel has only a couple of scenes and one mumbled line of dialog. This is the story of the “other” brother, who’s tugged between the rock ’n’ roll DNA somehow in his genes and the wishes of his father to pursue a more righteous path.

The Identical is a modest little movie, made on a shoestring, no-frills budget of $3 million. Sometimes it feels just one rib poke away from a Saturday Night Live skit, or the kind of outright parody John C. Reilly did with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, his faux-Johnny Cash send-up. But it plays it straight—and narrow, constantly hammering its faith-and-values themes of reconciliation, forgiveness and discovering “who [God] made us to be,” and over-amping every emotional tone to eleven.

Seth Green and Joe Pantoliano provide hijinks that feel lifted from old Happy Days reruns. Judd spouts homilies like “Slap the dog and spit on the fire.” And Liotta (also one of the executive producers), best known for playing a mobster in Goodfellas, digs in to his role as a man of the cloth like it was made out of ham and cheese.

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Despite some scenes with howlingly high levels of hoke, some viewers will nonetheless likely find something to love about this bland, edge-less, Elvis-tinged parable, which has nothing to offend, shock or rub even the most sensitive of sensibilities the wrong way—like a lot of Elvis’ music, or his own movies. Come to think of it, Presley may have “left the building” long ago, but his spirit is still around, even in a strange little movie that pretends it’s not.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 01 2013
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Music, Pop Culture

Last Stand in Memphis

SONY DSCRe-released recordings show Elvis at final creative peak

Elvis At Stax

CD $24.89 (RCA/Legacy)

In a 12-day burst of creative steam, Presley hit the Stax studios in his hometown of Memphis, Tenn., for two sessions in 1973, yielding his final string of Top 40 singles (including “Promised Land,” “I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby” and “If You Talk In Your Sleep”) and more than two dozen other tunes that let him stretch his style across the a spectrum of rock, country and gospel. This affordably priced, 40th anniversary 3-CD commemorative set includes them all, and also 27 outtake tracks, plus and a photo-packed booklet with extensive notes about the songs and the sessions.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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