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Later, Hawke also tears into Elvis’s baldly villainous manager, that Dickensian grotesque Colonel Tom Parker. Hiatt tears up entering the Rolls, noting that it offers the sense of “how trapped he was.” Perhaps most memorably, Ethan Hawke geeks the hell out over Elvis’s triumph at Sun Records, telling the story of his first recording session for Sam Phillips with infectious relish. A too-quick section cuts between Chuck D, Jones, and David Simon as they tangle, with some passion, with the idea of cultural appropriation. Citing actual evidence and essaying an actual conclusion, Marcus draws upon Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville to situate Elvis and rock ’n’ roll as both American and revolutionary - and he convincingly likens Elvis to Captain Ahab. There are moments of clarity and insight. You might want to hear more about that theory, but Jarecki has no time to allow anyone or anything to be persuasive: He’s got to show us a 2016 Bernie Sanders rally Ashton Kutcher driving and musing about fame Alec Baldwin vowing, in the run-up to that election, that Donald Trump will not win footage of nuclear tests a history of falling wages in Detroit and all the times that Rolls got towed.
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Not only is Mama Presley’s gyratin’ boy the center of the center of the military industrial complex, it turns out - one dude insists - he’s the reason Vegas went from the city most honest about what America is to one ruled by crass corporations rather than upstanding mobsters. His vision of Elvis is multitudinous, containing everything anyone wants it to, and algebraic, in that you can plug any variable you plug into it and yield a result - one usually infected by the idea of an America in decline. Tracing the geography of Elvis’s ascent, from Tennessee to New York, from Hollywood to Las Vegas, Jarecki finds opportunities for speedy précis on any topic that interests him.
THE KING 2018 ELVIS DOCUMENTARY S TV
And nothing can prepare your mind for the sequence in which Elvis’s TV debut in New York is illustrated with footage of the original King Kong chained on a stage, a vision followed up by nothing less than Dan Rather reciting “America the Beautiful” at the top of the Empire State Building. Here, just fifteen awkward seconds after Jarecki treats us to the jubilant sight and sound of a squad of Memphis teenagers belting out “Chain of Fools” in the back seat, we’re suddenly hearing Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and watching footage of the Klan. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intones on that record, “I’m the NBC peacock,” before suddenly carrying on about something else on a different night. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter. Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. The Rolls rolls slowly, but the film floors it, speeding relentlessly from topic to topic, image to image, tone to tone. “The cultural imperialism, the military imperialism, the economic imperialism of the United States is the global fact of the last century,” Jones says, “and Elvis Presley is at the center of the center of all of that.”ĭon’t expect to see Jones actually make, like, a case, though.
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Here’s James Carville, Greil Marcus, Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Immortal Technique, and Van Jones, who really seems as if he’d rather be talking about something else. Interviewees wax on about Elvis and all that he can be made to represent, but usually only in context-free, free-associative clips that rarely run more than ten or fifteen seconds. Ward, John Hiatt, the Handsome Family) into the back seat and lets them play while he tools about Tupelo, Memphis, Nashville, and then America at large. Whatever it is, it looks like fun: Jarecki crams musicians (M. “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” says the road-crew chief. “What do you think I’m doing with this movie?” director Eugene Jarecki ( Freakonomics, Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) asks the chief of his road crew some forty minutes into The King, a restless documentary bafflement about pretty much everything but most specifically about driving Elvis Presley’s Rolls-Royce across America and wondering what went wrong, with Elvis, with America and, in this one revealing moment, with The King itself. Ward are two of the artists who get the opportunity to sit in the back seat of Elvis Presley’s Rolls-Royce in “The King,” director Eugene Jarecki’s restless documentary.