<\/p>\n
Baz Luhrmann came to the Toronto International Film Festival thee years ago with his movie \u201cElvis,\u201d which survived a lengthy, pandemic-delayed production to land eight Oscar nominations and earn almost $300 million worldwide. You\u2019d think that he\u2019d be ready to move on at rhetorical end of that journey, but Luhrmann was back at TIFF on Saturday with another Elvis movie, this one titled \u201cEPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.\u201d<\/p>\n
The title seems as if it could tell you everything you need to know about the movie, but Luhrmann has grander ambitions than that. The film is an Elvis concert movie of sorts, drawn mostly from footage filmed for a pair of early 1970s documentaries, \u201cElvis: That\u2019s the Way It Is\u201d and \u201cElvis on Tour.\u201d But it\u2019s far from a straight concert film, because it mixes concert footage with rehearsals, studio sessions, archival materials and voiceovers in which Elvis describes his life in a way that seems more casual and perhaps more honest than most of his public statements.<\/p>\n
More from TheWrap<\/strong><\/p>\n Luhrmann calls it a \u201ctone poem,\u201d but you can also think of it as a remix along the lines of the nerviest moments from Luhrmann\u2019s last Elvis movie, when a song might start with the familiar Elvis version, performed by Elvis or by star Austin Butler or by a mixture of the two, but also bring in hip-hop elements before it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n \u201cEPiC\u201d is Elvis through the Baz lens, where big and bold is always preferable to straightforward and where going over-the-top is never considered a bad thing. If it\u2019s not revelatory for people who\u2019ve seen the existing films from the era, it\u2019s the most imaginative, generous and entertaining look at a time in which Elvis\u2019 comeback still had real life to it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also got a great beat and you can dance to it, as the audience at the Princess of Wales Theatre did.<\/p>\n (Of course, Luhrmann may have helped prompt that by his pre-screening comment that he\u2019d be looking for the most enthusiastic audience members and giving them swag.)<\/p>\n The film is based around shows Elvis did at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in the summer of 1970; it wasn\u2019t his return to live performances, which had happened in the previous year, but a later engagement that was filmed for the movie \u201cElvis: That\u2019s the Way It Is.\u201d But a few other shows also went into the mix,which means we get to chart a year or two of Elvis by his jumpsuits: the white, studded look of those \u201970 first Vegas shows; a light blue number that found Elvis a little paler and puffier, featured in \u201cElvis on Tour,\u201d; a dark blue suit that fell in between.<\/p>\n And the performance veer between playful and passionate, with Elvis in great voice throughout on the raw rock \u2018n\u2019 roll songs from his past and the full-throated ballads to which he would increasingly turn for the remainder of his career. Highlights include the first-ever live performance of \u201cBurning Love,\u201d a tantalizing few moments of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cI Shall Be Released\u201d and the arrival of \u201cSuspicious Minds\u201d and \u201cCan\u2019t Help Falling in Love\u201d as true showstoppers.<\/p>\n \u201cEPiC\u201d is a film that more or less follows an Elvis show but is always on the move in and around that show. Offstage Elvis informs onstage Elvis and vice versa, and the zeal with which Luhrmann whips it all up into an undefinable Elvispalooza is fit for a King.<\/p>\n The post \u2018EPiC\u2019 Review: Baz Luhrmann Doesn\u2019t Need Austin Butler to Make Another Rockin\u2019 Elvis Movie<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Baz Luhrmann came to the Toronto International Film Festival thee years ago with his movie \u201cElvis,\u201d which survived a lengthy, pandemic-delayed production to land eight Oscar nominations and earn almost $300 million worldwide. You\u2019d think that he\u2019d be ready to move on at rhetorical end of that journey, but Luhrmann was back at TIFF on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2003118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[311575,346263,25617,344764,346265,318702],"class_list":["post-2003117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-austin-butler","tag-baz-luhrmann","tag-elvis","tag-elvis-movie","tag-elvis-on-tour","tag-toronto-international-film-festival"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Baz-Luhrmann-Doesnt-Need-Austin-Butler-to-Make-Another-Rockin.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2003117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2003118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2003117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2003117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2003117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}