Two days ago I wrote that Austin Butler doesn’t look enough like Elvis — at best he’s a young John Travolta. The new trailer suggests that Butler doesn’t have the surly Elvis drawl either. (Kurt Russell‘s Elvis voice was ten times better.) It’s one thing to not resemble Elvis but to sound like him, and another thing to not have the voice but to own a serious look-alike thing, but to come up short on both counts is a huge problem — it really is.
Forget reanimating the actual long-gone Elvis of yore — Butler doesn’t even seem like a good Elvis imitator. He just doesn’t have it.
And yet Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis trailer gets one thing absolutely right — it conveys the effect of Presley’s explosive sexual current and how the wiggles and pelvic thrusts made young girls pant, or at the very least pause.
All this time I’ve been wondering if the Elvis guys (director-writer Luhrman, screenwriters Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner) would be including the “fat Elvis” chapter, or roughly the last three years of his life. Unless the trailer is lying by omission, the apparent answer is “no.”
There is, however, a seriously fat Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, and he’s wearing one of the best fat suits I’ve ever seen in a film…seriously, hats off. Or do I mean “fats off”?
I can’t seem to identify the fair-haired kid who plays 11 year-old Elvis in Tupelo, but this is almost exactly what Elvis looked like as a tweener. Odd that Luhrmann chose correctly in this realm, and yet totally dropped the ball with the adult-sized version.
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