Tag: paul simon

Elvis (review)

June 24th, 2022

Elvis
159 minutes; PG-13
Critic’s grade: A-
“Elvis is everywhere,” roots-rocking revivalists Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper declare on the 1987 novelty hit of the same name. The video features shots of the duo and Elvis Presley interspersed with images of average folks of every age, race, sex, body type and nationality dressed up like the American icon or showing off their Elvis-inspired products.

“Elvis is everything,” Nixon sings. “Elvis is everybody/ Elvis is still the King/ Man, O, man/ What I want you to see/ Is that the big E’s/ Inside of you and me, yeah.”|

To be sure, Elvis was still everywhere back then, 10 years after his untimely if not altogether unexpected death at age 42. Impersonators of the King flourished at Las Vegas wedding chapels and on stages all over the country. “Elvis has left the building,” fried-peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and TCB — “taking care of business” — were still touchstones.

Elvis gold chains and license plates continued to pop up all over the place, and Graceland routinely swarmed with tourists (and lent its name to a Paul Simon album released the year prior). Countless folks swore that they had seen Presley’s face in the clouds or on a piece of toast. Some said that they had run into the flesh-and-blood man himself at a gas station, a barbershop, or the mall. Multiple pop stars pointed to Elvis as a musical forebear and major influence.

The subject of ritualistic, near-religious and maybe slightly creepy devotion, Elvis seemed to be more alive during the three decades or so after his death of a cardiac arrest — which occurred on the throne, as the crass joke went (he expired on his bathroom floor) — than he’d been in the last few chapters of his troubled life. He was gone too soon, thanks to a weak heart aggravated by a dependence on drugs and alcohol, probably worsened by a terrible diet and other maladies. Fun fact: his complete autopsy will finally be unsealed in 5 years.

Thirty-five years after “Elvis is Everywhere,” the King no longer holds sway over pop culture to the degree that he once did. But with “Elvis,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann performs imaginative rites of onscreen zombieism: He practically brings the movie’s title character back from the dead for the viewing and listening pleasure of contemporary audiences, at least a couple of generations of whom weren’t born until after Presley died. That’s no mean feat, and the results are largely a delight to behold.

Luhrmann, the Australian-born director and high-concept movie magician, created an unstoppable audiovisual carnival with 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!,” gave new life to Shakespeare with his refried “Romeo + Juliet” in 1996, and reimagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel of the 1920s with “The Great Gatsby,” released in 2013.

“Elvis,” arriving nearly a decade after Luhrmann’s last film, is a sometimes intoxicating mixtape of Elvis-ness, a wannabe cosmic collage of the Saturday night Delta blues, Sunday morning tent-revival gospel, pure charisma & hip-swiveling sexiness that helped transform the Tupelo country kid and devoted Mama’s boy into an enduring global celebrity. It’s mostly big fun, with a whole lotta shakin’ going on.

Is “Elvis” truly greater than the sum of its hyperactive, swirling, in-your-face, time-tripping parts, not all of which match the level of Austin Butler‘s fascinating and gripping impersonation of The King? Not sure yet.

But Luhrmann once again demonstrates his ability to reach out, grab viewers, and hold on to us nearly all the way to the end, when he closes more than two-and-one-half hours of passion, pathos, drama and humor in the life of this Elvis incarnation with footage of the real thing. It’s a coda that, yes, may make some viewers feel a bit of sadness about the loss of an era that — nominally, at least, from the vantage point of 2022’s social, political and economic turmoil — seems less confusing and more innocent.

Austin Butler, left, as Elvis Presley, right.

If the “Elvis” movie were a stage of its subject’s career, it would be the Fat Elvis years, when “Also Sprach Zarathustra” on the sound system announced his arrival on a Vegas stage with an oversized band. His shows were exercises in too-muchness, over the top and proud to be born that way. That’s in contrast to the early years, when he led a rootsy, stripped-down band, recording raw, intimate-feeling tracks like 1954’s “That’s All Right” at Sun Studios in Memphis and then making a splash at local auditoriums.

Likewise, Luhrmann’s extravaganza of a movie is all about the excess, dazzling viewers with a relentless, frenetic assault of sights and sounds bolstering a story that’s probably too large to tell within the confines of a movie of this length.

Luhrmann begins by connecting the dots among the various sounds that influenced Elvis’s approach to music making — in the movie, it’s “I’ll Fly Away” in its bluegrass and black gospel versions, and the blues of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog.” Austin blues star Gary Clark Jr. plays Crudup, and the late Shonka Dukureh portrays Thornton.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JVPXHMc3Q18?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Frequently flashing forward and back, Luhrmann touches on many of the familiar mileposts on Elvis’s road to superstardom. Most chapters are here, if not necessarily presented according to the real-life timeline. After Frank Sinatra’s adulation by the bobby soxers but before crowds went gaga for the Beatles, Elvis makes the girls hyperventilate — on stage at the Louisiana Hayride country music radio show, his first of many appearances there. He signs a lopsided management deal giving half of his earnings to shady Dutch-born promoter “Colonel” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a former Tampa dogcatcher who declares that “show business is snow business.”

Then: Elvis leaves Sun for RCA Records, buys the Graceland mansion, goes into the Army, suffers the loss of his beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), and marries Priscilla Parker (Olivia DeJonge); the two met cute — or creepy cute? — in Germany when he was 24 and she was 14 (her age is glossed over).

Along the way — in addition to the above mentioned artists — there are encounters with entertainers B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Hank Snow (David Wenham), Jimmie Rodgers (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and of course Sun Studios owner Sam Phillips (Josh McConville).

The cast is well chosen: All turn in galvanizing performances, and Yola, Mason, Clark and Dukureh (who died July 21 at age 44) are straight-up knockouts. The tasty soundtrack is bolstered by vintage and recent material, including some snatches of hip-hop; all work well together to underscore the action.

Parker is the teller of this tale, with some passages deploying his voiceover narration. If “Elvis” is flawed, that positioning could be part of the problem — it frequently feels a bit artificial and contrived. Maybe that’s because of Hanks, who seems to be walking through a role that comes off as corny, and too heavily relies on a goofy, showy accent. Would the performance have been enhanced had it been played by someone less famous than Hanks?

Anyone with at least a passing interest in Elvis, or a thing for the roots of modern pop music and/or that period of history, will want to see Luhrmann’s movie on the big screen, with speakers cranked. The nostalgia buzz at the heart of “Elvis” is real.

And yet Luhrmann’s movie is about more than simply reanimating a cultural corpse. The filmmaker’s apparently genuine affection for everything Elvis has resulted in a blast of giddy Americana that may prove infectious even to those who know The King only as a faded, easily mocked musical curio from the increasingly distant past.

Word is that there also exists a four-hour director’s cut of the movie that includes Elvis’s off-the-rails encounter with President Nixon and pays more attention to Presley’s relationship with his bandmates, guitarist Scotty Moore (Xavier Samuel) and bassist Bill Black (Adam Dunn).

I wouldn’t be surprised if an Elvis series were to be announced for one of the streamers — just speculating here. Stay tuned, and keep your eyes open for a sighting of The King at your local diner. Hey, it could happen.
Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (review)

June 22nd, 2022

94 minutes; PG-13
Critic’s grade: B-

It’s impossible for me to approach a documentary about Jazz Fest aka the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, with anything like the cool detachment required to give a fair shake to any given piece of film art.

Why? Because I’ve attended the fest, one of the best and most eclectic music gatherings in the world, umpteen times since the late ’80s, including a 5-year stretch of consecutive visits starting in 2006, about 8 months after Hurricane Katrina crippled and remade New Orleans, and ending in 2010. That year, I was treated to an afternoon of unforgettable, rootsy rock, blues and Americana music when the Allman Brothers Band and Levon Helm’s group, with loads of special guests, played back to back on the same stage.

It really did feel like a bit of musical paradise on earth when I experienced world-class performances, by hometown heroes and global superstars alike, at one of the fest’s dozen venues — whether on the giant stages at either end of the sprawling Fair Grounds Race Track, the jazz, blues, or gospel tents, or the other locations. The list of my favorite shows over the decades is long, but here’s the short version: Stevie Wonder, the World Saxophone Quartet with African drummers, James Brown, Galactic, Paul Simon, Mose Allison, Randy Newman, Elvis Costello with Allen Toussaint, Sharon Jones, McCoy Tyner, Astral Project, Terence Blanchard, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, Los Hombres Calientes, Randy Weston, various Marsalis family members.

At its best, Jazz Fest, the nickname for an event that has never strictly focused on jazz, has been enormously influential on my musical tastes as a listener and as a player. During the early days of my long-running band Acme Jazz Garage, we frequently included Meters songs in our sets. And one of my original tunes, “Mr. G.P.,” a Meters salute referencing the band’s bassist George Porter Jr. is on our 2016 debut CD.

So, in short, I’ve come to dearly love Jazz Fest, and the New Orleans musical culture in which the event is enmeshed. Since at least my mid-’20s, I’ve been drawn to the artistic/spiritual vibe of a place that’s unlike anywhere else in America. One year, I attended all 10 days of the fest; at one point, a buddy and I considered moving to the city. I’ve become something of an evangelist for the fest, writing about it for the Tampa Tribune (where I was the pop music critic from 1988 to 1996), the Tampa Bay Times, Billboard, Variety, and jazz magazines. I’ve participated in online and in-person gatherings by the Threadheads, a group of Jazz Fest supporters.

On some occasions, though, I’ve been extremely annoyed by how ginormous the fest has become, in terms of the exploding attendance. Every year, the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May, several hundred thousand music aficionados and partiers now swamp the event. I’ll admit that the intense crowding and heat, and some of the logistical hassles of getting to the Fair Grounds and back, bug me more now than when I was 27.

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” the first — I think — full-length documentary/concert film on the subject, focuses on the 50th fest in 2019. The nickel review: It isn’t bad, a fun introduction to the fest for those who’ve never attended, even if it’s less than wholly satisfying for longtimers. The movie does a pretty nice job of placing viewers into the midst of the fest, and helps demonstrate why it’s all such an amazing experience for music lovers.

The film does check most of the right boxes regarding the origins of the affair, which was started in 1970 by jazz festival innovator George Wein — Duke Ellington was the only non-Louisiana act at the debut fest, which reportedly attracted about 300 attendees. Wein, mastermind of the Newport Jazz Festival, Newport Folk Festival, Playboy Jazz Festival, Kool and JVC jazz festivals, and many other major music fests, was succeeded by local music aficionado and promoter Quint Davis, who transformed the fest into one of the largest events of its kind in the world. For better and (maybe) worse, its current incarnation is an affair with a budget of $20 million-plus that is said by organizers to have a regional economic impact of $300 million. Making the thing go depends on major corporate funding — the fest is no longer the grass-roots event of its first couple decades or so.

“Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” offers some great footage from the early years, and devotes at least a little time to the various musical influences — regional Louisiana, gospel, soul, trad jazz, the roots of the music in Congo Square — that have come into play in the fest’s programming. “Jazz Fest” also touches on the impact of Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras Indians traditions, second-line parade rhythms, New Orleans cuisine, and Katrina. And it rightly takes a look at one of the fest’s star offstage attractions — the tangy, savory food offered by about 60 Louisiana-based food vendors offering such treats as jambalaya, red beans and rice, gumbo, and a bazillion crawfish dishes.

There’s a moving sequence on the 2006 fest, with clips of Bruce Springsteen and Co. turning in an emotional “My City of Ruins,” and some talk about what the gathering meant to the sagging spirit and economy of the post-disaster city.

There’s a moving sequence on the 2006 fest, with clips of Bruce Springsteen and Co. turning in an emotional “My City of Rains,” and some talk about what the gathering meant to the sagging spirit and economy of the post-disaster city.

But (and this is a BIG, if somewhat expected, but) screen time unfortunately is dominated by non-New Orleans Big Name Acts, the kind that you could see play any venue in America. Representing the 50th fest are long clips of Rev. Al Green (a highlight), Pitbull, Katy Perry, and Earth, Wind and Fire, among other name entertainers. Sorry to report that Jimmy Buffett‘s version of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is about as bland and forgettable as you might imagine (surprise: Buffett, of course, is an exec producer, along with Quint).

Oddly, and inexplicably, the film doesn’t offer recent or vintage extended performance clips of the Neville Brothers, the Meters, Dr. John, Galactic, Henry Butler, Astral Project, Kermit Ruffins, the Iguanas, the Radiators, the subdudes or many other of the city’s notable musicians. It’s really a wasted opportunity in that respect, a pretty glaring oversight.

Adding insult to injury, there are simply too many interviews with folks who have little or no connection to New Orleans or Louisiana music. No need to list those names. But those moments contribute to the feeling that the entire movie was intended to be a glorified advertisement for the fest, designed simply to bump up ticket sales rather than meant to capture the heart and the soul of the thing.

As a jazz fan, I’ll add that I really do appreciate the focus on interviews with the late, great Ellis Marsalis — in many respects, a forefather of the city’s modern jazz scene — and his more famous sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason, and the footage of their performance at the Jazz Tent during the 2019 fest. THAT’s the kind of performance that makes Jazz Fest distinctive — it was the first time in maybe decades that all five had played together. You couldn’t see that anywhere else. And now, with Ellis’s passing, it’ll never happen again.

And kudos to the producers for including performance clips of such New Orleans stalwarts as soul queen Irma Thomas, the Ben Jaffe-led Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and slide guitarist Sonny Landreth.

Despite my misgivings, recent and veteran Festgoers alike will find a lot to enjoy about the film — it’s a convenient way to share our love for Jazz Fest with those who’ve yet to experience one of the most amazing, most eclectic musical and cultural events in the United States. For maximum audiovisual pleasure, go see it on a big screen with loud speakers.

Tag: paul simon

Elvis (review)

Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story (review)