{"id":128601,"date":"2025-09-08T10:37:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T10:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/128601\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T10:37:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T10:37:07","slug":"epic-elvis-presley-in-concert-review-baz-luhrmanns-exciting-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/128601\/","title":{"rendered":"‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Exciting Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThink back to the greatest concert you ever saw \u2014\u00a0it could be Springsteen or U2 or the Stones, or Lady Gaga or the Ramones, or Taylor Swift or Radiohead, or (in my case) two concerts from the \u201980s (Prince and X) and one from the 2000s (Madonna on her Confessions tour). Now think back to the greatest moment in that concert, the one that gave you chills you can still feel. That\u2019s the kind of experience I predict you\u2019ll have watching \u201cEPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert<\/a>,\u201d an extraordinary new documentary directed by Baz Luhrmann<\/a>, the director of \u201cElvis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie is a revelation, because for 96 minutes it shows you just how intoxicating Elvis Presley was when he began to perform live in Las Vegas in 1969 and the early \u201970s. Many don\u2019t quite think of him that way. There\u2019s still a mythology hanging over Elvis during this period \u2014 the Vegas glitter, the white suit with the half-sun cape, the giant finger rings and the car-grille sunglasses, the \u201cThus Spoke Zarathustra\u201d-from-\u201c2001\u201d bombastic musical intros, the sweat pouring off his shag-carpet sideburns, the onstage karate moves. It can all add up to a vision of the king of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll presiding over a kingdom of kitsch.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut there\u2019s the myth and there\u2019s the reality, which has always been incredible, and there are reasons why the perception of that reality has evolved over time. I can hardly overstate the degree to which in the \u201970s, the simple fact that Elvis was performing in Las Vegas was thought of as unspeakably cheesy; it wasn\u2019t what rock performers did. His outfits seemed a parody of grandiloquent fashion camp, and the fact that he would sing \u201cThe Battle Hymn of the Republic\u201d right along with \u201cHound Dog\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Be Cruel\u201d made him seem like some cornball Americana nostalgia act.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what\u2019s changed? In the age of Vegas residencies (not just Gaga but the Grateful Dead!), Elvis\u2019s Las Vegas gigs now look startlingly ahead of their time. The taint of it all has melted away. (Vegas is no longer the place where vulgar \u201cMiddle Americans\u201d go; it\u2019s the place where everyone including hipsters go.) And in the age of fashion as postmodern excess, where stars are now expensive exhibitionists, Elvis\u2019s straight-Liberace costumes, in their quite intentional loud-and-proud spangled peacock gaudiness, no longer look like something anyone would even think of ridiculing; they have the glam audacity of true\u2026rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. (It\u2019s Jimmy Page, in his comfy sweaters, who now seems dated.) Elvis, in the early \u201970s, was still relatively lean and mean, and still incandescent to look at. He was in his regal mid-thirties, with those sexy dimples and one of the greatest heads of hair in rock history. And that voice! His tremolo vibrato made every note into a pearly gem.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeven years ago, when \u201cBohemian Rhapsody\u201d came out, I went back and watched a lot of footage of Queen in concert, because I wanted to key into Freddie Mercury, who is now universally thought of as one of the most electrifying performers in the history of rock. He deserves that reputation. But I\u2019m here to testify that he\u2019s about one-third as electrifying as Elvis was in the early \u201970s. The power of Elvis\u2019s voice remained undiminished \u2014 it soared, it quavered, it caressed, it boomed, it rocked, it hit every note with singular beauty. And though he would sometimes flirt with comedy in his moves, and didn\u2019t jiggle the way he did in 1956, the way he held and moved his body still possessed a flamboyant erotic eloquence.<\/p>\n

\n\tLuhrmann originally planned to incorporate never-before-seen footage of this period into \u201cElvis,\u201d and decided against it. But what he discovered, at the time, was 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm footage in the Warner Bros. archives, including vast outtakes from the \u201cElvis: That\u2019s the Way It Is\u201d (1970) and \u201cElvis on Tour\u201d (1972), the two major Elvis concert films, plus audiotapes of unheard interviews. Much of the footage was silent (though there was corresponding audio), and it all needed to be painfully synced up, a process that took two years. Diving into this treasure trove of unseen performances, working with the editor Jonathan Redmond, Luhrmann has fashioned a streamlined and exquisitely paced concert film. Narrated by Elvis (from the interview clips), it incorporates rehearsal footage from when he was getting ready to play Vegas for the very first time at the International Hotel (offstage, we see what a perfectionist Elvis could be, and also what a charmingly modest and gregarious hang-out buddy), and it interpolates numerous performances from his Vegas residency, almost all of them from the early \u201970s.<\/p>\n

\n\tElvis performed more than 1,100 shows from 1969 to 1977, and at a certain point, when the drugs and the overeating were taking their toll, he did start to slide into a parody of himself. But not in the early years. And watching that vintage period now, we feel the life-force charge of what Elvis still had, which is very connected to what he had in 1956, but also different. When you see footage of Elvis in the \u201950s, from \u201cEd Sullivan\u201d or wherever (\u201cEPiC\u201d includes some never-before-seen footage of his legendary \u201cgold lam\u00e9 concert\u201d from Hawaii in 1957), you\u2019re seeing two things at once: a staggeringly great performer, but also a man who with every hip shake and lip curl was changing the karma of the world. That\u2019s not an exaggeration, and it\u2019s baked into the original Elvis experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ultimate inaccurate clich\u00e9 is F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s statement that \u201cthere are no second acts in American life.\u201d (He was really talking about himself.) Elvis Presley had one of the greatest second acts in history, and it began in 1968, when he had his legendary network-TV comeback special. Lurhmann opens \u201cEPiC\u201d with a long and dazzlingly edited summary of Elvis\u2019s career, notably the movies, which were indefensible but in a certain way underrated. (They were kitsch, but even the worst of them were highly watchable kitsch.) But there\u2019s no doubt that Elvis had faded as a musical force. Starting in the late \u201960s, he returned with a vengeance, and what was telling is that the meaning of his style and the meaning of his presence had shifted. He was no longer a rebel; you can\u2019t be one after you change the entire world into something created in your image. But what that meant, since we were no longer plugging into the volcanic revolutionary side of his sexual swagger, is that we now experienced him purely as\u2026a pop and rock musician.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie warms up with the rehearsal footage, where we see him, in a blindingly colorful super-psychedelic shirt, do haunting renditions of the Beatles\u2019 \u201cYesterday\u201d and \u201cSomething,\u201d and also Dusty Springfield\u2019s \u201cYou Don\u2019t Have to Say You Love Me.\u201d We hear Elvis talk about how he cherishes all kinds of music \u2014 how as a teenager he would listen to Mario Lanza and the Metropolitan Opera. The \u201csoft\u201d side of Elvis has always been major. But shortly after that, he\u2019s onstage singing \u201cThat\u2019s All Right,\u201d and the reason it doesn\u2019t feel like nostalgia is that the song\u2019s velocity is ramped up \u2014 it now sounds like a bullet train. Elvis was backed by a group of musicians, known as the TCB Band (for Taking Care of Business), that totally kicked. James Burton\u2019s guitar solos are blistering, and when Elvis stands onstage and plays air guitar along with them, it\u2019s a thrill, because it\u2019s less corny than loosely choreographed abandon.<\/p>\n

\n\tElvis and the band do a \u201cHound Dog\u201d that\u2019s so fast it\u2019s punk. He sings \u201cPolk Salad Annie\u201d (\u201cHer mama was working on the chain gang\u2026\u201d) with a gritty momentum worthy of Tina Turner, and in a very cool hybrid he segues back and forth between \u201cLittle Sister\u201d and \u201cGet Back.\u201d And in a sequence guaranteed to give you those chills, we see him perform \u201cBurning Love,\u201d one of his two greatest songs from that era, for the very first time (he\u2019s still reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper), and it just about burns the house down.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tElvis also fools around a lot: He fellates the mic, he mocks the lyrics, he sings with a bra on his head (he got tossed a lot of those), and Luhrmann, picking up on this spirit, offers his own bit of mockery by accompanying Elvis\u2019s performance of \u201cYou\u2019re the Devil in Disguise\u201d with a montage of Col. Tom Parker, who we also glimpse in the concert standing just behind Elvis as he works his way through the crowd of adoring women. Did Parker deserve the bad rap that Lurhmann gave him in \u201cElvis\u201d? Peter Guralnick\u2019s new book argues otherwise, but I think Guralnick misses the forest for the trees. Elvis, as he himself explains in the documentary, was passionate about his desire to perform in other countries (which he never once got to do), and if that one thing had been allowed to happen, I believe the whole trajectory of his life might have been different.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEPiC\u201d climaxes with a surly-sublime version of \u201cSuspicious Minds,\u201d an indescribably great song that could almost be the battle hymn of a republic that had attained a 50 percent divorce rate. And when the movie is over, you want to applaud the showmanship: Elvis\u2019s, and also Baz Luhrmann\u2019s. He reveres Elvis too much to let any excessive flash get in the way. There\u2019s a purity and natural-born dazzle to \u201cEPiC.\u201d What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn\u2019t get any better than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Think back to the greatest concert you ever saw \u2014\u00a0it could be Springsteen or U2 or the Stones,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10796,49,48,75,70571,2559],"class_list":["post-128601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-baz-luhrmann","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-epic-elvis-presley-in-concert","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}