Elvis

"Colonel" Tom Parker may be the ultimate unreliable narrator. Thus, it’s an odd choice by Baz Luhrmann to hand the story in this biopic over to him. The viewer really starts to wonder, long before it is made explicit that the man was full of shit, about everything we see, both from that point in the narrative and retrospectively as well. Then again, this story seems to gloss over large portions of Presley’s rise and career, so unreliability may be baked into the whole cake. As it stands, with the movie and story we do get, there some transcendently great moments here, interspersed among what are otherwise standard biopic scenes. What this film does do most effectively is make the argument that Elvis had a certain musical genius--built heavily on borrowings, to be sure, but synthesized into a form, a presence, and an oeuvre that, perhaps, only he could have made into such a unique and wildly successful body of creative work. There was, and still isn’t, anyone like the King--and reminding us of that is this movie’s ultimate success.