las vegas

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)

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In an effort to promote Celine Song’s blank-eyed romcom Materialists last summer, A24 listed the director’s “movie syllabus” for similar big-screen romances that would set the mood for the picture, ranging from obvious Jane Austen-inspired connections like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. to headscratchers like the Robert Altman murder mystery Gosford Park (huh?). This year, Emerald Fennell promoted her “Wuthering Heights” adaptation with a similar syllabus of inspirations compiled for the BFI’s Letterboxd account, with obvious choices like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet clashing against headscratcher inclusions like David Cronenberg’s Crash (huh?). This “movie syllabus” trend is far from the most obnoxious promotional gimmick in an age where filmmakers are pushed to chug hot sauce, take lie detector tests, and play video games to reach audiences through TikTok & YouTube; at least it’s about the movies. Still, there’s a kind of “Show your work” eagerness to the maneuver that feels pre-apologetic, asserting that the filmmakers have done their homework and know their stuff, therefore the movie they’re promoting is Legitimate Cinema. It’s the same feeling I get when biopics conclude with real-life footage of their subjects in the end credits sequence, proving that they were well cast, styled, and researched regardless of whether the final product of all that effort was any good, as the point of making movies was accuracy, not artistry.

In a way, Baz Luhrmann’s new documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a two-hour argument for his 2022 Elvis biopic‘s historical accuracy, extending the “Show your work” credits sequence bragging to feature length. Constructed entirely from the archival footage pulled for reference material while staging the Vegas residency sequence of the Elvis biopic, EPiC hammers home just how accurate Luhrmann’s team was in recreating Vegas-era Elvis’s sets & costumes. The 16mm footage from those Vegas shows, its rehearsals, and the resulting roadshow American tour is cleaned up & restored to the same vivid HD image quality as the narrative feature it inspired, to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between Austin Butler fellating his microphone vs. Elvis doing the same (except that Elvis is slightly goofier about it, and more beautiful). Like with the other “Show your work” maneuvers of its ilk, however, that doesn’t retroactively make Elvis a great movie, just because it’s proven to be a visually accurate one. It is a lot more useful to an audience than an email screenshot, a Letterboxd list, or an end-credits stinger, though, since it stands on its own as a separate work of art. As a concert film, EPiC is equally garish & scatterbrained as the last picture Luhrmann made about Elvis, but it does have a leg up on its bigger, louder predecessor in that it’s anchored by its reverence for the archive, and it isn’t frequently interrupted by Tom Hanks blathering about “snow jobs” under several pounds of prosthetics.

I don’t personally care much for Elvis Presley’s music, especially during his Vegas period, when he had strayed so far from rock-n-roll that he had become a kind of lounge-singer circus act. Luhrmann frequently draws attention to the contrast between Elvis’s 1950s rock-n-roll beginnings to his 1970s stage-musical crooning by juxtaposing early television-broadcast performances of songs like “Hound Dog” with the proggy monstrosities they had become by the time they reached Vegas. It’s a different genre of music entirely, one that prefers broad spectacle over lean aggression, which is exactly what makes Luhrmann such a great fit for the material. Even if you don’t vibe with the music of EPiC, the spectacle of its onstage pageantry is still worth a gawk. Elvis is working in James Brown mode here, conducting every guitar stab and drum fill of his backing band with the suggestive wiggling of his caped & jumpsuited body. He belts, patters, and sweats with the best of ’em, performing more as an athlete than as a musician. In the most deranged sequences, Elvis takes a break from singing to instead run laps around the concert hall, making out with untold dozens of women in the audience one at a time without concern for personal violation or illness. It’s more of a space alien encounter than it is a live concert (the kind where everyone in the audience clearly wants to fuck the alien), making him the perfect subject for a Baz Luhrmann stage show.

On a formal level, there isn’t much Luhrmann is doing here that can’t be found in other recent music docs; he’s mostly just following the modern industry standard. In sequences where Elvis’s stage show is interrupted by rehearsal footage from behind the scenes, EPiC recalls the Beyoncé concert film Homecoming. In the frantic introduction that provides context for Elvis’s pre-Vegas career before the show begins, Chris Smith’s recent DEVO doc comes to mind. The brief sequences of pure restoration recall the Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, especially in the third act, when Elvis goes Gospel. David Bowie has recently seen both extremes of that treatment, both in the restoration of his concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and in the post-modern kaleidoscope edit Moonage Daydream. I enjoyed all of those movies to varying degrees, mostly because I enjoy listening to those artists’ music, so it was obviously more of an uphill battle to get on board with a singer whose songs I don’t care about. If the two entries in the Luhrmann-Elvis project have done anything for me musically, it’s in convincing me that “Suspicious Minds” is a pretty good song, one that Luhrmann was smart to make the core theme of his Elvis thesis, both sonically and lyrically (leaning on the “caught in a trap” motif when depicting the Vegas residency as the apex of Colonel Tom Parker’s abusive mismanagement of Elvis’s career). If the project’s done anything for Elvis’s legacy, it’s in posthumously fulfilling the singer’s wish to appear in “better movies,” which he was frequently blocked from doing after returning from WWII (again, through Parker’s mismanagement). Luhrmann should be prouder of that accomplishment than the lesser feat of “showing his work” by restaging the Vegas Elvis lookbook, which is a victory usually celebrated in more by-the-numbers biopics like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Showgirl (2024)

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“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”

That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade.  It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge.  The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama.  It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop.  Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade.  She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before.  If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better.  You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.

Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight.  Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s.  Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility.  Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona.  The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase.  The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot.  It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.

There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve.  At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts.  She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost.  Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills.  In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse.  That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot.  Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry.  Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.

-Brandon Ledet

Army of the Dead (2021)

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Thanks to the post-production remodeling of the mythical “director’s cut” of Justice League for HBO Max, there has been a ton of online critical reclamation of Zack Snyder’s artistry this year.  The “It’s pretty good, actually!” consensus on The Snyder Cut has earned him the same “vulgar auteur” status previously bestowed upon filmmakers like Tony Scott, Paul WS Anderson, and Michael Bay – real meathead types.  Personally, I’m not seeing the vulgar genius of Snyder’s work, at least not in relation to his absurdly expensive Justice League revision.  That 4hr superhero epic registered with me as the pinnacle of plot obsession in contemporary cinema, getting so mired in the connective tissue between action sequences that it transcends the medium altogether by becoming Television.  The Snyder Cut couldn’t be faulted for being erratic or messy like the previous edit of Justice League, but in smoothing out all rough edges on that compromised vision, Snyder created a pure-plot experience completely devoid of recognizable humanity or imagination. I almost admire The Snyder Cut for pushing the modern superhero picture to its obvious endgame (a $400mil TV miniseries), but I might just be telling myself that so that I feel like I got something out of the time investment.  Either way, it’s interesting as a cultural curio but aggressively mediocre as entertainment media, so that the director is only worth engaging with for the hype he inexplicably generates.  It’s less that the emperor wears no clothes; it’s that I don’t understand why everyone’s so ecstatically complimenting the emperor’s Ed Hardy t-shirt.

Even with my Snyder Cut skepticism still festering as an open wound, I can at least admit that 2021 has been a career-restorative year for the director in other ways.  His new straight-to-Netflix zombie epic (everything he makes is a dialed-to-11 epic) isn’t exactly a whiplash-inducing return to form after the exhaustion of Snyder Cut discourse, but it’s still a charmingly goofy, mildly entertaining follow-up.  I’ll take it.  Army of the Dead is easily Zack Snyder’s most enjoyable movie since his Romero-homage debut Dawn of the Dead (penned by James Gunn, who turned out to be the more talented voice in the room), by which I mean it’s Passably Okay.  It appears that the zombie flick is the only appropriate fit for Snyder’s obnoxious blatancy, from his boneheadedly literal soundtrack cues to his exhausting emphasis on every single scene as the most Epic, all-important moment ever.  Army of the Dead surely would’ve landed with more impact and novelty in the nu-metal aughts, when Snyder’s previous action-horror felt like a breath of fresh air.  It’s starting to become adorable that he’s somehow still stuck in that long-putrid era, though.  He’s been hacking away at the same dirtbag Godsmack aesthetic for so long that it’s pushed past tacky to become full-on kitsch.  I understand the temptation to reclaim him as a misunderstood genius in that context, if not only because it’s a funny gag.  In practice, though, his movies are way too draining to be worth the small flashes of enjoyment you can glean from them, even when they’re Passably Okay overall.

Dave Bautista stars as a superhuman burgerflipper who has survived the zombie apocalypse by laying low working the grill at a greasy diner.  He’s approached by a shady casino owner who hires him to break into the quarantined city of Las Vegas and recover an abandoned vault full of untraceable cash, guarded only by hordes of cannibal corpses roaming the otherwise empty streets & gambling halls.  From there the movie is a blend of militant zombie-shooting action horror and a self-amused heist film.  As those two genres run in tandem, there’s all the assembling-the-team montages, first-person video game gore, disastrous getaways, and witty interpersonal banter (mostly notably delivered by Tig Notaro as the resident wiseass) fans of either side of the divide could hope for.  And then there’s more.  And then more.  And more.  Army of the Dead‘s 148min runtime is an outright war crime, dulling all its genre-blending, Vegas setting fun with at least an hour’s worth of superfluous material that should have been lopped off in the editing room.  Like 2004’s Dawn of the Dead, the film peaks during its opening credits, which squeezes in an entire zombie movie’s worth of exposition into a concise, bite-sized morsel of a montage (set to a Richard Cheese song, another Dawn of the Dead callback).  It’s the only part of the movie that could be considered concise, considering how unnecessarily weighed down and laborious everything that follows feels.  There’s a fun 90min movie buried somewhere in this macho, self-important excess, but Zack Snyder does not make those kinds of movies.  Pity.

If we can have a years-later Snyder Cut revision of Justice League, I think we also deserve an Un-Snydered cut of Army of the Dead.  I’m not saying we need to toss out all his unashamed meathead tendencies, where the initial zombie breakout is caused by roadhead and the years-later evolved zombies are referred to as “Alphas.”  Keep all the Gym Bro action horror you want, just make the damned thing zippier.  There’s a stripped down, streamlined, self-contained movie in here that absolutely rules, but you have to squint real hard through the Hoobastank fog to see it.  Snyder needs someone to push back on his All-Out Epic tendencies, especially when it comes to explaining each and every baby step in the plot.  Instead, like with The Snyder Cut, he’s allowed to turn the modern zombie movie into modern zombie television, something we’re all sick of after 29 seasons of The Walking Dead.  Army of the Dead is already greenlit to spin off multiple prequels and animated side plot series on Netflix, the same way The Snyder Cut reconfigured Justice League into a 4-hour made-for-TV miniseries.  That mode of literal-minded, plot-obsessed Epic filmmaking is not some vulgar stroke of auteurist genius in the modern media landscape.  It’s just how big-budget “movies” are made now in a post-MCU world.  At least this one has its moments.

-Brandon Ledet