Review of Elvis

Really rather good biopic, which foregrounds but does not demonise the figure of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's manager who took 50% of everything that he earned.

Elvis comes out rather well...anti-racist, though not political or public about it, and rather more talented musically than I'd recognised. Elvis died at 42 when I was 19 and I barely marked it - I thought of him as a washed-up has-been playing a kind of music that I didn't think much of or about. 

It's a Baz Luhrmann film so lush and very colourful, but quite inventive in the shooting, cutting and editing. 

Parker is at least as much the focus of the film as Elvis, and he's a complex figure. The film says Elvis never toured abroad because Parker didn't have a passport, or indeed any legal identity at all. Oddly the colonel title seems to have been the only thing about him that was genuine...the colonelcy was bestowed upon him in 1948 by Jimmie Davis, the crooning governor of Louisiana. Jimmie Davis was a racist and a segregationist, btw, so perhaps the colonel didn't share Elvis's feelings about Black people.

Watched on TV via HDMI cable to laptop and informal distribution.