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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
2 — Wednesday, July 20, 2022
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I love walking out of movie
theaters, mainly when the movie feels
like it has changed my life. I stand up,
coming back into a body I’ve forgotten
for the past two hours, and step down
the stairs while the end music plays.
The film’s atmosphere — a world of
excitement and drama and loss, all
arcing and sucked free of mundanity
— is still thick in the air. I will never
be closer to that world. I walk outside,
look out at the world in the afterglow
of the film, with everything it told me
held inside my chest, and things look
different. The feeling usually fades
by the time I’m home, lasting until
the next day at best. Never as long as
I expected from a film that at first felt
life-changing.
I
rewatched
Pixar’s
“Soul”
recently, wherein Joe (Jamie Foxx,
“Django Unchained”), an aspiring
jazz musician, must help an unborn
soul find her “spark” in life or die
Read more at michigandaily.com
When it comes to making a biopic,
every production is going to take a
different route. If you’re “Bohemian
Rhapsody,” you’ll use the real-life voice
of Freddie Mercury for songs played
in the diegetic context of concerts or
recordings. If you’re “Rocketman,” you
treat the biopic more like a musical, with
the life of Elton John framed around
a series of his songs performed as
elaborate musical numbers. And if you’re
Baz Luhrmann (“The Great Gatsby”),
a director known for his maximalist
approach, directing a biopic about the
life of Elvis Presley, well … you end up
making it more like a fever dream.
“Elvis” follows the titular Elvis
Presley (Austin Butler, “Once Upon
a Time in Hollywood”) through his
rise and fall (read: rise and death) as
a musician through the eyes of his
manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom
Hanks, “Finch”). It’s a marathon of a
movie, taking you through multiple
decades and through many different
phases of Elvis’s life — from his early
and provocative beginnings to his
time in the army to his Las Vegas
residency and everything in between
— framed around his complex (and
often contentious) relationship with the
Colonel. It’s fitting that the beginning
of Elvis and the Colonel’s management
relationship starts at a carnival because
the whole movie kind of feels like one,
with flashing lights and the pace of a tilt-
a-whirl.
Like any film brought to the screen
by any of the capital-D Directors we see
today, “Elvis” is covered in Luhrmann’s
fingerprints — from the ostentatious
visuals to the extraordinary attention to
the music. There’s certainly a lot to look
at throughout the film: flashy period-
specific costumes and accessories,
frenetic editing and scenes that focus
primarily on creating a spectacle.
“Elvis” also has an unusual soundtrack
that combines period-specific music
with more modern tunes, a feature that’s
KARI ANDERSON
Daily Arts Writer
becoming one of Luhrmann’s signature
touches. However, deliberate needle
drops of Elvis songs and performances
of blues tunes are overshadowed by odd
music choices: dramatic strings playing
over Elvis songs, bizarre inclusions of
songs by modern-day artists (such as
a jarring Doja Cat addition), even an
I-must’ve-heard-that-wrong
hint
of instrumentals from ’90s hits like
“Toxic” and “Backstreet’s Back”
hidden in a montage.
before his music career begins. Joe,
who believes his passion for music is
his spark, doesn’t understand that a
spark is not a particular purpose, but
a love of life itself. That is what the
soul, named 22 (Tina Fey, “30 Rock”),
must find. This is expressed in a scene
where Joe’s idol tells him a fable about
a fish in search of the ocean. When
told that he is already in the ocean, the
fish says, “This is water. What I want is
the ocean.” It’s an easily decipherable
metaphor for underappreciating the
life you’re already living.
I liked directing duo Daniels’s
(Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)
“Everything Everywhere All at Once,”
even though it told me nothing new.
It’s a different story from “Soul,” but
the films share their most obvious
message: Life is beautiful just because
it is life, despite how difficult or bland
it often seems. Both films have more
to them than this message — “Soul” is
more specifically about appreciating
life as a whole rather than losing sight
of all but one particular goal or passion.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
leans into the meaninglessness of life
and addresses familial conflicts and
generational trauma — but the elusive
beauty of normal life is the main
takeaway.
I dislike movies whose messages
I’ve heard before, but this type of
life-affirming film is an exception.
When my mom told me she liked
Wim Wenders’s 1987 film “Wings
of Desire” because it made her
feel “happy to be alive,” that was
the draw for me. In the film, an
angel, Damien (Bruno Ganz, “The
House that Jack Built”), gives up
immortality to return to ordinary
life, partly in order to be with the
living woman he falls in love with,
but also to experience “at each step,
each gust of wind, to be able to say,
‘now’ … and no longer ‘forever’ and
‘for eternity.’”
In “Soul,” 22 watches a man and
his daughter walk by on a sidewalk,
the wind blow through a tree and a
seed pod spiral to the ground — basic
life things, but in this scene, they are
enough to make her want to live.
In “Everything Everywhere All at
Once,” Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh,
“Crazy Rich Asians”) realizes that
life in her universe is worthwhile,
despite being “meaningless” because
of the love she has for her family.
Design by Abby Schreck
Worrying about the films that bring me
temporary joy
Baz Luhrmann tries to get you “all shook up”
with ‘Elvis’
Austin Butler as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama “ELVIS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures
release.
Read more at michigandaily.com
ERIN EVANS
Daily Arts Writer
HUGH STEWART/Daily