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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

