As far as it goes, HE approves of Austin Butler‘s performance as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann‘s hyper homina-homina biopic.
On 5.26.22 I wrote that Butler “does a good workmanlike job in the title role. He apparently gave everything he had. As Owen Gleiberman has written, Butler looks less like Elvis than the young John Travolta mixed with Jason Priestley. But he worked it hard. Respect.”
Yesterday HE commenter Eddie Ginley, an incessant troublemaker, asked readers to remember “when Wells sounded the drum beats against Butler’s casting?…now the praise for his performance is the one unifying factor in all reviews….What happened? How did Wells get this so terribly wrong?”
HE response: “I got nothing wrong. Don’t lie, don’t fabricate. I had been profoundly unimpresssed with Butler’s Tex Watson in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and reacted accordingly to his Elvis casting, partly because he doesn’t genetically resemble the Real McCoy. DON’T LIE.”
Ginley responded by quoting from an HE piece about the Elvis casting process: “Four contenders had recently screen-tested for the Presley role in Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between the iconic rock star and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and it was my view that three of them — Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller and Harry Styles — weren’t right. My judgment was that 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seemed “the most interesting possibility among the four.'”
HE response: “What did I basically say? That Butler seemed less problematic than Elgort, Teller (too old) or Styles. That doesn’t mean Butler (John Travolta meets Jason Priestley) was a perfect choice, and I had made it quite clear that his Tex Watson was, to me, a creepy poseur. I hated the way he said ‘I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s bidness!’ [not a typo]
“Whenever a thoughtful person calls this or that creative choice ‘interesting,’ that almost ALWAYS means they have a slight issue with it. ‘Interesting’ is a close relation of ‘impressive.’ It’s a dodge word that smart people use when they don’t want to share their actual opinion.”