All posts tagged: Baz

Long Live The King! Baz Luhrmann and Vanity Fair Host a Snowy, Society-Heavy Screening of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

Long Live The King! Baz Luhrmann and Vanity Fair Host a Snowy, Society-Heavy Screening of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

Luhrmann’s film doesn’t quite square with Bangs’s counterman source there. After the screening, he tells Vanity Fair that Elvis at this point of his life was completely co-opted by his questionable manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who only let him tour in America and sometimes made him play up to three times a day. Parker had him in Las Vegas, playing nightly, for close to a decade. “He’s fatter, he loses his spirit. He’s deteriorating, that’s what you’re seeing. Imagine wanting to tour overseas and doing that for seven years?” Luhrmann says. “But Clive Davis told me to this day he still has never been to an opening night as great as that Vegas show was.” Indeed, while some moments of the film show Elvis sweating, sluggish, and struggling to get through his set, others show his once-in-a-lifetime performing prowess, like when he belts out Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” For those of us who weren’t alive when Elvis was, it feels like an a-ha moment: where you finally get why the generations of …

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert review – Baz Luhrmann restores The King to his real-life Seventies glory

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert review – Baz Luhrmann restores The King to his real-life Seventies glory

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter There is a moment in EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert when a teenager in the front row clamps her lips onto Elvis like a limpet, before she is swiftly dislodged by her mother. Elvis, unruffled, moves on to the next one. At another point, a bra is flung in his direction; he instinctively turns it into a bonnet. Just as The Beatles incited mass hysteria, so too did the King – all despite never performing outside of North America. Clearly, Baz Luhrmann is one of his devotees. Returning to the subject four years after his feverish, Oscar-nominated biopic Elvis was released in a blizzard of sequins and rhinestone-encrusted bombast, the Australian director fashions a film that is exhilarating, immersive and so immediate that the 5,000 miles (and 50 years) between the singer’s Las Vegas stage and a cinema seat in Britain …

Baz Luhrmann Fetes the King

Baz Luhrmann Fetes the King

There’s a huge difference between memorializing a piece of pop culture and reanimating it. Dutch DJ-producer-musician Tom Holkenborg, who records as Junkie XL, achieved the latter in 2002, taking the semi-obscure 1968 Elvis Presley song “A Little Less Conversation” and remixing it for a Nike commercial. By adding an unrelenting backbeat, punching up the guitars and horns and funkifying the drums, the electronic overhaul transformed a throwaway tune recorded for a minor Presley movie into a 21st century global smash, catching fire in dance clubs and reaching No. 1 in over 20 countries. The track now lives on as a classic banger. Four years after his glittering bio-drama, Elvis, Baz Luhrmann pulls off something akin to Holkenborg’s magic act with EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. The Australian director doubles down on his worship of a subject whose flamboyant showmanship, soaring emotions, perpetual motion and ravenous taste for bling make them very much kindred spirits. It’s as if Luhrmann were conducting a séance, awakening Elvis from the afterlife with a raw vitality and outsize energy that …