Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do?

Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do, so much so, viewers can’t get enough of the grisly, often unsettling, hour-long crime documentaries and cheap questionable made-for-cable-TV movies of the week on Lifetime. The stories about such real-life villains from Bernie Madoff and Alex Murdaugh to mass shooters and serial killers have been rehashed several times over. What new information could one say about these no-good pieces of shit that wasn’t already revealed when they first happened years or decades ago.

Is it to introduce a new generation to their atrocities so their tales of committing one, if not all the seven deadly sins live on in infamy? Or God forbid, inspire them to commit the same crimes?

I asked myself such questions after viewing the 2016 documentary, “77 Minutes”, which explored the mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California July 18, 1984, that left 21 people dead and 19 injured before the gunman was taken out by a SWAT team sharpshooter.

Ironically the time it took for authorities to get the go-ahead to stop the gunman’s rampage forty years ago is the same amount of time police in Uvalde, Texas got the order to engage an 18-year-old mass shooter who during those same “77 minutes” gunned down 19 students, two teachers and wounded 17 others May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. 

Not only are the comparisons eerily similar in law enforcement's failure to immediately engage both gunmen, let alone the time the massacres began to the time they ended, but the number of dead at Robb Elementary was the same number of those killed at the McDonald's.

The mass shooting, like so many that came soon after the past four decades, was another case where evil ALWAYS triumphed over good and though the good succeeded in eventually stopping the perpetrators, or the shooters cowardly took themselves out before battling police, the damage had already been done. Lives are forever ruined. No one from those who were there who lived to tell about it to the viewers who watched the aftermath on the news or on YouTube would ever be the same.

The unspeakable tragedies stay with us long after they’ve become distant memories we hope to never look back on.

In a perfect world the minute these no-good pieces of shit departed there’d be no more retellings of their despicable life stories much to our personal glee. They’d be doing their time in the fires of Hell prior to their meeting with the Grim Reaper and being denied entrance to the pearly gates by Saint Peter and the Almighty.

The reasons why we can’t seem to get enough of hearing about these perpetrators could be numerous. Perhaps it’s because just when we thought we’d seen all the crimes various individuals have committed against society that we question if not admit being a little fascinated looking for answers on what makes someone go off the deep end? That a person with such a hatred for the Hispanic community whose victims ranged from eight months to 74-years-old could, we hoped at the time, would only be an isolated incident. In 1984 perhaps the devil was telling us “normal” people who have a respect for human life, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

I haven’t dwelled on the McDonald’s massacre since watching the documentary in July nor have I bothered to look up the life stories of other infamous mass murderers the past four decades.

All these monsters are the equivalent of Satan and we’re Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden being enticed to eat the forbidden fruit. I just know crime enthusiasts are salivating over producer Ryan Murphy’s next 10-episode series called “American Sports Story” chronicling the rise and fall of football star, Aaron Hernandez, which airs on FX Sept. 17.

There’s no stopping the entertainment industry and the media from churning out what’s mostly regurgitated often times over sensationalized tabloid trash.

The question is how many curious viewers can keep themselves from a taking a bite of that big rotten apple.

©7/24/24

Reason former President Trump and me are still here has nothing to do with “Divine Intervention”

I shouldn’t be here today writing this blog.

Since 2015, I’ve been hospitalized five times. The result of not taking my insulin and checking my blood sugars three to four times daily before eating and allowing the numbers to exceed to the 700 to 900 ranges since my first diabetes diagnosis in 2006. In one incident, the sugars were so high in the four digits the nurse at the emergency room couldn’t get a reading on the glucometer.

As many times as I’ve been in the hospital over the past nine years now, I wonder if anyone who’d heard about my stints, or cared, would ask me, if not ask themselves, if I got a death wish?

No one has to date.

God is not the reason why I’m still here. God and his angels didn’t send a subliminal message to mom telling her she should get my ass to the emergency room. Her medical knowledge and the fact she and any mother, for that matter, knows her own kid better than the kid knows themselves.



I just thought my moving slow, unable to swallow solid foods unless it was pasta or soup, moving blue spots, recounting certain moments in my life, gulping down three large McDonalds smoothies – one every 15 minutes, seeing traffic lights at night looking like distant stars, and sick to my stomach with an urge to barf every few hours were the result of a severe case of stomach flu.

“Jesus loves you,” said the nurse on my first stint to the hospital back in 2015 the night I was admitted. The nurse told me I was the talk of the floor who said how I looked like Death when I came in, but within a few hours I was almost back to normal - the result of the IV medication fluids.

Mom, not “Divine Intervention”, is the only reason I’m still here today.

Just like “Divine Intervention” didn’t stop the assassin’s bullet from what would have been a successful kill shot last Saturday at a rally held for former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. If Trump hadn’t referenced an immigration graphic, his head turned to the right side instead of directly facing the audience, the Republican Party, let alone the country, would be in as much turmoil as the Democratic Party is right now deciding President Joe Biden’s future as their democratic nominee in August.

As the self-appointed “Mayor of Realville” I don’t believe God and/or his angels kept me from “knock, knock-knockin on heaven’s door” any more than the notion the Almighty is watching over Taiwan, Israel, the Ukraine and America.

The notion God prevents tragedies from happening or keeps them from being worse than what the dire situation is already reminds me of what friend Michael Frazier commented on my Facebook page when I posted a picture of an angel hovering above the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in 2012 at a memorial service for the victims killed by a mass shooter.

"I believe there are Angels, and they are with us," Frazier wrote. "It is not outside the Lord's preview to perform miracles. I don't believe this is an angel any more than that picture of the twin towers had Satan's face in the smoke after the planes hit. Angels are spirits, not clouds. If they were going to appear to anyone, why would they be veiled in a cloud?"

Yet “God” and “Divine Intervention” was what lawmakers said saved the former president at this week’s Republican National Convention.



Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, said her late mother was watching over her father at last Saturday’s rally. Rep. Cory Mills said, “divine intervention” and the “protective hand” of God saved the Republican presidential candidate.

Would Republican lawmakers still be saying the same thing if Trump hadn’t survived the assassination attempt? Doubtful.

I won’t argue that God is everywhere 24/7. You just have to look. The Lord will always listen to your pleas whenever you need him. He doesn’t hold a grudge. He won’t say, “Hmm, you have not been to Sunday mass for months and years, and now all of a sudden you are asking for my help to bail you out of some personal crisis you are in right now?”

God is as much present in our daily lives as the Devil.

“Our God still saves. He still delivers, and he still sets free. Because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back on his feet, and he roared,” said Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.

Well, that “American lion” was not the Almighty. It was the former president who got back up after the bullet zipped past his right ear as secret service agents swarmed on top of him. Trump, the “American lion” not God, raised his fist to the crowd as he was whisked away off stage letting them know he was ok.



God didn’t stop “the Devil” from hitting his target. The spectators at the rally who saw the suspect perched on a roof top 150 yards away from the stage were the ones who alerted law enforcement officials minutes before gunfire erupted.

“Someone’s on top of the roof,” said one. “There he is, right there.”

“He’s on the roof!” said another. “Right here, right on the roof.”

A Secret Service sharpshooter, not God, took out the gunman.

If God really, really, really wanted to prove to humanity he is around, Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old retired fire chief of Buffalo Township who died at the rally shielding his wife and daughter would be here.

You are a born liar if you tell me you’ve never asked yourself why God took someone’s life, but spared another. I can’t tell you how many times I felt like pounding my fist through a wall after hearing the latest news of a police officer, newly married, with a baby on the way and just joined the force lost his life in the line of duty in Anytown, USA. It’s like asking why a tornado spared one house but wiped the home next door off the map.

The only answer I can come up with is, life’s not fair. It is what it is. It’s the nature of the beast.

Why horrible things happen to people and others are spared will only be answered when we go before the Almighty and ask him that question. I wouldn’t be surprised if, even in death, he or she won’t like the answer.

There’s only one, and ONLY one reason why I, and former President Trump are still here today.

It’s not our time yet.

©7/17/24

Appreciation: Shelley Duvall (1949-2024)

When an audience member asked Shelley Duvall where she ranks Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, "The Shining" (1980), in her body of work, the Texas born actress jokingly said, “It’s my Vietnam.”

Duvall, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas and grew up in Houston, recounted her experiences working with the reclusive director whom she called “a genius” before a full house, April 26, 1999, at the USA Film Festival in Dallas following a screening of the film.

Filming "The Shining" took six days a week, 16-hour days and lasted a year and one month.

“I was so out of touch with the world after that film finished that I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Duvall said.

Audiences applauded when Duvall’s name flashed on the movie’s opening credits as a beat-up Volkswagen made its way through the Colorado mountains.

“They say there are a million stories in the naked city,” Duvall began. “Well, there are a million stories on The Shining that I really don’t know where to begin.”

Duvall provided some interesting facts behind the making of the movie.

“Jack (Nicholson) and I weren’t really driving in Colorado or anywhere like most people think. We filmed it all at Elstree Studios in England. That was all second unit stuff; the driving shots in the Volkswagen going up and up to the Overlook Hotel.”

The actual front of the building seen in the film was actually the Lookout Mountain Hotel in Oregon.

“That was built to scale in the back lot,” Duvall added. “The sets inside were huge and covered the entire studio.”

Kubrick never told his cast how to do a scene while shooting the film.

“He doesn’t really give you a whole lot of direction as to doing it this way or that way,” she explained. “As a matter of fact, before we shot my first scene which was in the apartment, Stanley took me aside, told all the other crews to go away and asked me privately, ‘Listen, Shelley, how would Robert Altman do it?’”

The question came up because Duvall had worked with Altman in the past prior to "The Shining" that included "Nashville" in 1975 and "3 Women" in 1977.

“I just looked at him and said, ‘What???’” she exclaimed not expecting a great director like Kubrick to ask her that.

“Stanley never said act this way with Jack,” she commented. “But Jack would give a different take than I would. Working with Robert Altman, I never did more than five takes and that was only one time in the seven films I had done with him.”

According to several articles in Variety and Entertainment Weekly, however, Kubrick was known for shooting more than thirty takes of a scene.

“I was really worried when I first started working with Stanley that by the time the fifth take occurred, I asked him, ‘Am I doing anything wrong,’” she asked. “Stanley just said ‘No. I just don’t print anything until after 35 takes.’”

During the last 40 to 45 minutes of the film, Duvall’s character, Wendy, was seen frantically running around throughout the hotel trying to find her son, Danny. She was frightened, crying, and holding a sharp long knife to protect herself from Nicholson’s psychotic ax-wielding Jack Torrence and fleeing from the resort’s ghostly apparitions.

Director Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall on the
the set of The Shining.

While shooting those sequences, the actress admitted she had to think of reasons to cry.

“I had already exhausted all the deaths in the family, pets and pretty soon, I would just wake up in the morning and cry because I didn’t want to go to work and cry all day,” Duvall added. “It was absolutely physically exhausting. I wondered how long a person could cry before going into shock.”

Filming those scenes, Duvall said she looked like a ghost.

“There was no makeup and the dark circles around my eyes, that was real,” she said. “I don’t think I remember ever having any circles whatsoever before I did this film.”

Though she admits her next movie with Altman, "Popeye" (1980), was “a much happier experience,” Duvall said working with Kubrick was still a fascinating one.

“It was great to work with Jack Nicholson, but it was too bad he had to be mad at me all the time,” she said. “He’s one of those guys who really gets into a part and sticks to it.”

Duvall said she didn’t know where or what actor Danny Lloyd was doing today, who played their terrified son in the film and lived in Pekin, Illinois at the time when he got his first role.

“His father was a train engineer, and both parents quit their jobs and moved to England,” she said. “They were over there six months before Jack, or I were there.”

At the film festival, an audience member asked if Duvall thought Danny was a normal child.

“He was a very normal child when he came in,” she laughingly commented. “He was “Tony” when he came out,” in reference to the boy’s imaginary character in the film who was the devil. 

Another audience member inquired about a final scene Kubrick cut a week after the film played in theaters in 1980. According to author Laurent Bouzereau’s book, "The Cutting Room Floor", the original ending had Duvall’s character in the hospital being visited by Ullman who tells her that her husband died.

The actress, however, admitted she doesn’t remember the sequence ever being shot.

“Jack’s last day of filming was of him freezing to death and when it was over, he was so glad to go home to see his Lakers play again,” she said. “I don’t think Stanley ever wanted the film to end. I don’t think he ever wanted the process to end. He loved making movies.”

Renowned horror novelist Stephen King made it no secret he didn’t like Kubrick’s version of his bestselling 1977 novel when the film was released.

Duvall thought it was because the author would probably prefer his name at the beginning of the title.

“I think it would be because all the videos say, “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” and not “Stephen King’s The Shining,’” she remarked.

King adapted a script from his book and ABC remade it into a six-hour mini-series in 1997. Duvall said she only saw about thirty minutes of part two.

“It just wasn’t as good as the original,” she added. “I can’t help it. You have to be honest in your opinions otherwise, what is your opinion worth?”

Duvall died July 11, 2024, at age 75.

©7/11/24

Biden/Trump debate like watching Apollo Creed fatally lose to Ivan Drago

The first presidential 2024 debate held June 27 on CNN between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump marked the first time watching two opponents square off against each other where, within the first 15 minutes, I immediately knew who’d won!

The mano a mano event reminded me of the exhibition match in “Rocky IV” (1985) between former World Heavyweight Champion, Apollo Creed. and Russian boxing champion Ivan Drago.

In this case, I saw Trump as Drago and Biden as Creed. (I just know Trump haters will love that comparison)!

When Drago delivers that fatal blow to Creed who stands erect for a moment in mid-air before crashing to the canvas face down, and tells shocked spectators, the press and the world, “If he (Creed) dies, he dies,” I equated that scene to the comment Trump made towards the end of Thursday’s debate as Biden struggled to answer one of the moderator’s questions.

“I really don’t know what he (Biden) said at the end of that sentence,” Trump told CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

When the two candidates sparred citing how one had the better golfing handicap, I cringed. The last time I did that was when I saw Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy sing the nursery rhyme, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at a campfire in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” (1989).

There was Trump acting like the bigger man telling his challenger how the two of them should not act like children.

“You are a child,” Biden told him.

“He (Biden) challenged me to a gold match,” the former president said. “He can’t hit a ball 50 yards.”

“I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him (Trump),” Biden told the moderators boasting about his shooting six strokes over par. “I’m happy to play golf with you, if you carry your own bag.”

Oh my God! How I yearned for that “Will you shut up man” comment Biden said to Trump during the September 2020 debate!

The past three years this country has lived in what might as well be called the “Bizzaro World” Jerry Seinfeld spoke of in that episode of “Seinfeld” (1989-1998) where Superman lives in a time where everything is the opposite.

Bad is good. Black is white.

In “Biden Land”, our withdrawal from Afghanistan was as much an honorable exit as President John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961 where 1,400 America-trained Cuban forces, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, failed to remove Fidel Castro from power.

Rising grocery prices? Come on, man!

The men and women in the US military had nothing to worry about in “Biden Land”. All came home safely. Those 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Internation Airport in August 2021? Didn’t happen!

Nor did those three U.S. soldiers who died during a drone strike on a U.S. base in Jordan in January 2024. These two tragic incidents were “deepfakes.” A word White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a news conference in reference to the recent videos of President Biden looking confused. I wouldn’t put it past her if she’d have called that August 2021 and the January 2024 terror attack “deepfakes” if given the chance, assuming there was such a word back then.

If only such a place as “Biden Land” existed where a president doesn’t look at his watch three times as the remains of 13 military servicemen and women arrive in flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base.

Biden did after all say he was the only “president this century that doesn’t have any this – this decade, any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he (Trump) did.”

Makes me want to quote what Trump said at the debate earlier saying, I really don’t know what the current commander-in-chief said about how no one in the military died under his watch since 2020 and, I don’t think he knows what he said either!

As for the border crisis? What border crisis? A migrant crime wave? That doesn’t exist in “Biden Land!” No good piece-of-shit illegals killing Americans? If such were the case, Biden's second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris, who was only chosen as the president's running mate in 2020 because of her skin color as a means to score the women and black vote, would have done something about the border crisis!

In "Biden Land" no one’s heard of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, 16-year-old Lizbeth Medina, Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five or 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley.

Oh wait! President Biden has heard of Laken Riley! I mean, “Lincoln” Riley! Got to get my quotes right.

In “Biden Land”, the Border Patrol has our current president’s back!

The president even said they did at the debate and to quote Seinfeld’s George Costanza, “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”

I’m no fan of Biden or former President Trump. I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and whether I chose to NOT vote for him again this time not even Yoda, the 900-year-old Jedi Master from the Star Wars movies can see into the future.

That doesn’t mean I wanted to see President Biden crash and burn like he did Thursday night. You Trump supporters might want to hold your cheers. The election is still 126 days away as of this blog. A lot can change.



I was horrified by Biden’s performance. I wanted to see the anger and the will to fight he exhibited at the first debate in 2016 with Trump when he walked out on stage with his arms up welcoming his challenger like he was ready for battle. Much the way Apollo Creed urged Ivan Drago to get his hands up to touch his opponent’s gloves as a sign of respect before their exhibition match.

Seeing that moment at the 2016 debate reminded me of the words Creed told Drago in “Rocky IV.”

“Come on, get your hands up, man! You need an interpreter? It’s time to go to school!”

When Creed’s gloved hands slammed down on Drago’s there was an ominous thud.

The ominous thud at last night’s debate showed how much the current president had changed mentally the past three years.

I did not expect to see the president exhibit a raspy voice. Talk too fast. Look down at his notes. Lose his train of thought. Look at the television screen and the moderators like a waxed figure who wasn’t sure where he was. Looking at former President Trump as his opponent gave conflicting views. Trump not once, glancing back at Biden, or if he did I either didn’t notice or he didn’t do it as often.

I dare anyone, pro/anti Biden supporters to tell me what they saw Thursday night was not “beyond devastating” and a “nightmare” – words used to describe Special Counsel Robert Hurr’s report on the president earlier this year.

I can’t tell you how much it pains me, if not for millions of Americans, that the choice come November to be the next commander-in-chief is either going to be a convicted felon or a current president whose age and mental health are as much for discussion as Trump’s legal troubles.

Both candidates are liars. The question is like Pinocchio, which candidate has the longer nose.

I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. Trump making promises to bring American journalist Evan Gershkovich home from Russian custody and ending the war between Russia and Ukraine before taking office next January, if elected, makes me want to ask him the question from that 4imprint ad, “Are you 4imprint certain?” 

Trump is no President Ronald Reagan.

Biden was right about one thing concerning his debate with the former president when he spoke to a crowd of supporters the next day in North Carolina.

“I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.”

He had me there for a second, that is before adding how he knows right from wrong, how to do the job and how to get things done.

If only Biden had quit while he was ahead.

©6/28/24

My Personal Worst Films: Elvis (2022)

Elvis «½

PG-13, 159m. 2022

Cast & Credits: Tom Hanks (Colonel Tom Parker), Austin Butler (Elvis) Olivia DeJonge (Priscilla), Helen Thomson (Gladys), Richard Roxburgh (Vernon), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (B.B. King), David Wenham (Hank Snow), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Jimmie Rodgers Snow), Leon Ford (Tom Diskin), Gary Clark Jr. (Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup), Yola (Sister Rosetta Tharpe), Natasha Bassett (Dixie Locke), Xavier Samuel (Scotty Moore), Adam Dunn (Bill Black), Alton Mason (Little Richard). Shonka Dukereh (Big Mama Thornton). Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner. Directed by Baz Luhrmann.

2023 Golden Globes
3 Nominations

Best Motion Picture - Drama

Best Director - Motion
Picture - Baz Luhrmann

Winner - Best Performance
Austin Butler

2023 Academy Awards
8 Nominations

Best Picture

Best Achievement in
Makeup and Hairstyling

Best Sound

Best Actor - Austin Butler

Best Achievement in
Cinematography

Best Achievement in
Costume Design

 Best Achievement in
Film Editing

Best Achievement in 
Production Design

Midway through director Baz Luhrmann’s lavish spectacle, “Elvis” (2022), chronicling the life of Elvis Presley as played convincingly by Golden Globe winner Austin Butler, is a scene I found to be one of the film’s best moments. The clip had me wishing there had been more of them over the course of the biopic’s 159-minute running time.

The scene happens in 1968 as Elvis is rehearsing the song, “If I Can Dream”, in preparation for his television comeback tour. The shot, which can be seen on YouTube, compares Butler’s performance to the real-life Presley’s 1968 version. The one thing not lost watching those comparisons was how the singer poured his heart and soul into that performance – something he did throughout many concert appearances in his lifetime, even in his final years where he couldn’t remember the lines to some of his songs. Elvis Presley changed a lot physically while he was alive but the one thing that never evaded him was that commanding voice.

The song, “If I Can Dream”, stuck with me long after seeing the film. Even as I write this review that hit, along with “In the Ghetto” and “An American Trilogy” were among the ones I listened to from Elvis: 30 #1 Hits, the 2002 two-disc set released on the 25th anniversary of his death along with 2nd to None released the following year. I am no music aficionado, but I don’t think The Beatles, or the Rolling Stones had more than one or two greatest hits albums and, if they did, they wouldn’t come close to the combined 61 hits Elvis recorded in his lifetime that were listed on those double 25th anniversary releases.

There is no disputing audiences were captivated by Luhrmann’s film though most of the critics said otherwise. “Elvis” the movie was as critic proof as any unnecessary Transformers installment, or the multiple unwanted Marvel movies and television series Disney churns out.

Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was among the less than the half dozen movies released in 2022 I looked forward to seeing on the big screen. I knew given the filmmaker’s directing trademark of turning every picture of his into an event movie from “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)” to the Leonardo DiCaprio/Tobey Maguire collaborative remake of “The Great Gatsby” (2013). that “Elvis” was going to be no different.

The way “Romeo + Juliet” opened in modern day Rio de Janeiro with the Montagues and the Capulets engaging in a shootout at a local gas station with a pulse pounding soundtrack and choir in the background I found to be a throwback to the spaghetti westerns director Sergio Leone churned out back in the 1960s with Clint Eastwood. With “The Great Gatsby” I didn’t want the Jazz Age parties of the 1920s to end.

The trouble with “Elvis” the movie is Luhrmann directs here the way the icon’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, as played by Tom Hanks – with thinning hair, a paunchy stomach, a pointy nose and a southern accent like the real Tom Parker, promoted Elvis’ concerts. The filmmaker isn’t interested in capturing much emotion. He’s only interested in the thrill of the moment. Split screen shots, a filmmaking technique I’ve not seen done since the late 1960s and 70s with “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968) and “Airport” (1970) are incorporated in “Elvis” with good reason.

Luhrmann wanted to capture three of four different views of the same concert performances all at once. Just focusing on the beads of sweat on Elvis’ forehead to show how much energy he put into those appearances on one screen wasn’t going to be enough as seen in the film’s opening montage.

The director needed to show viewers shots of Elvis madly waving his arms as the instrumental version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays - as though he is trying to either fend off or grab something beyond his reach that only he could see. Then there’s the excited reactions of the crowds, mostly women, as an edgy Tom Parker watches from the back of the auditorium hoping his money ticket will get through the latest concert thanks to the medication doctors injected him with before arriving on stage. This scene, and others, couldn’t be done in four separate takes back and forth.

“I wanted to make a movie for the theater,” Luhrmann told Collider in 2022. “I make theatrical movies. My mission is to make a movie that’s not a franchise movie. All respect to franchise movies, I love my Batman. But I want to make a movie that cross generations, will come in that’s not a franchise and sit in a dark room with strangers and commune in a vast American story, a vast American opera. That’s what I hope this (“Elvis”) will be and that’s what I’m fighting for is to try and bring audiences of all types back into the theater.”



“Elvis” the movie is a visual feast of eye candy as names of the cities the king played in during his rise flash across the screen. While, Parker, the film’s antagonist, envisions the imaginary words “liar”, “cheat” and “conman” splashing up on the neon signs outside Sin City’s The International Hotel as he lays dying of a stroke alone in a Las Vegas hospital. All this thanks to a damning story by news outlets who report on the legendary promoter’s business dealings of fraud based on a new tell-all biography that accuse the showman of sending Elvis Presley to an early grave.

“I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” Parker says to himself as though he is talking to someone on the room. “Without me, there would be no Elvis Presley. And yet, there are some who’d make me out to be the villain of this here story.”

In a sense without Tom Hanks, there would be no movie about Elvis Presley, or at least not one that got fans attention at the box office and the eight Oscar nominations the film received but won none in 2023.

Like any memorable bad guy, Hanks’ Parker has all the good lines who every time Elvis says it’s time for the two to sever ties, the promoter, like the devil, comes back saying ok, but not without adding implications of what would happen financially if the artist went off on his own.

In one early scene that shows how clever Parker was marketing his money ticket, he has two separate buttons made – one saying, “I hate Elvis” and the other “I love Elvis.”

Parker’s thinking? “I love Elvis,” that’s an easy sell,” he tells Presley’s mother, Gladys. “Those who hate your son will do so whether we profit from it or not.”

On that level who knows what Parker could have achieved had he gone into politics as a campaign manager for candidates like former President Donald Trump in his second run for the presidency. With two “I love/I hate Trump” buttons created by the same campaign; Trump couldn’t lose. The money still goes into the same pocket.

The trouble with “Elvis” the movie is for a screenplay that was meant to make the viewer loathe the antagonist and love the protagonist, Hanks was unable to make me exhibit any hatred for Parker. Hanks can do any role including a bad guy. The question is would he be able to play a bad guy the viewer can grow to hate. Whether he is on screen or in person, Hanks has too nice of a persona to make one want to loathe any character he plays, good or bad. 

The only ones watching this film who’d feel any anger towards the promoter, and rightfully so, are those who believe the film’s assertion that Parker’s responsible for sending the performer to an early grave, taking advantage of his talents, and keeping him prisoner at the International under contract to help satisfy the latter’s gambling habits. Yet, it was Elvis who, in his final years, laid out his own path of self-destruction without Parker’s help.

I won’t argue Butler’s Golden Globe win in 2023 wasn’t deserved. Like the real singer, Butler put his heart and soul into the lead role to the point watching him was like watching Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991) as lead singer, Jim Morrison. I didn’t feel like I was watching Kilmer on the screen when I saw that film. I felt like I was watching the real Jim Morrison. The same can be said for Butler who made me feel like this was the real Elvis on screen, especially in the moments before the live 1968 TV special that has him rehearsing the lyrics to “I Can Dream” while a band member plays on a piano. The moment didn’t sound like Butler was lip synching. (Butler sings several of the king’s hits on the soundtrack).



Like Hanks’ performance who failed at making me exhibit any hatred for the guy, I can also say the same about Butler’s Elvis. Like the movie, Elvis the man is all show on the outside but not much on the inside. There’s plenty of “gone-too-soon” biopics I didn’t embrace over the years like “The Doors” but at least they had me either wondering what things would have been like if the artists had lived or kept me hoping their eventual demises wouldn’t happen. Not once watching "Elvis" the movie did I hope the king would avoid his eventual fate at 42 or ask myself, "What would his future in movies had been like if he had starred opposite Barbra Streisand in "A Star Is Born" (1976)?" Luhrmann's "Elvis" might be the first "gone-too-soon" biopic I've seen where I didn't feel a beloved artist like "The King of Rock and Roll" was not a life unfinished. 

Though Parker and Elvis get an equal amount of screentime, other characters in the script who played an obvious role in Presley’s life are nothing more than ships passing through the night. Minor characters like Gladys (Helen Thomson) and his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are only there to progress the film but make no lasting impression.

Equally disappointing is the script’s failure to focus as much on Elvis’ first wife, Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) as the film does on Parker and Elvis. She’s seen here as nothing more than a young attractive talking head; a trophy piece for Elvis to show off in public. The two scenes where Priscilla expresses herself to her soon-to-be ex-husband – one where she says she is leaving him and the other where she urges him to go into rehab (that moment never happened in real life) occur without any much background as to what led to those moments.



“Priscilla was not as involved with Elvis after their divorce as she would now have people believe,” biographer Alanna Nash told Screen Rant, who wrote "The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley." “Elvis would no more have responded to an intervention than a demand to give up singing.”

I learned more about the Priscilla character watching the less than three-minute music video of singer Kacey Musgraves’ version of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” which showed clips of Priscilla and Elvis in both good and bad times – scenes of which likely wound up on the cutting room floor.

Perhaps Luhrmann had so much to talk about when editing the king’s all-too-short life that it would have been impossible to cram everything into a less than three-hour movie.

The director admitted to Variety his four-hour cut of the film (which might never happen or be years in the making) is nothing compared to the shortened theatrical cut that included scenes of the icon’s meeting with President Richard Nixon in 1970, Elvis’ relationship with his first girlfriend, Dixie, and his addictions.

“There’s lots of stuff that I shot like the relationship with the band, I had to pare that down – and it’s so interesting how the Colonel gets rid of them,” Luhrmann said. “What happens is he starts doing wackadoo things – like going to see Nixon. I had it in there for a while but there just comes a point where you can’t have everything in, so I just tried to track the spirit of the character.”

This is the content I might have welcomed and maybe even awarded the film a slightly higher rating than the low one I give it. “Elvis” is too much spectacle and not enough substance.

Ask Elvis fans which adaptation of the singer’s life is the better movie and I already know what their answer will be. Forget “Halloween” (1978) director John Carpenter’s 1979’s Emmy nominated made-for-TV film, “Elvis”, that starred Kurt Russell, in the lead role and released two years after the icon’s death, they’ll say. They’ll all say Luhrmann’s is the definitive one. If they had any sensible reasoning, they’d simply tell me both movies are two differing interpretations. I wouldn’t count on that assessment though.

Anyone can make a movie about a beloved music icon who went too soon. It’s another if the filmmaker can leave the viewer without the depressing ominous feeling of how that icon’s life ends. I wanted Elvis to be like “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018) which was a celebration of the life of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, as played by Oscar winner Rami Malek, who succumbed to AIDS in 1991 at 45. That biopic went out with a bang.

Instead of showing the singer’s remaining years dying from the dreaded disease, though, the film ended appropriately with his 1985 Live Aid performance with the band. At one point during the movie’s theatrical release the film’s distributor, 20th Century Studios, showed the picture in selected theaters displaying the lyrics to the band’s hits so viewers could sing along. To my dismay I attended one of those screenings. Thank God, no one sang! “Elvis” the movie, however, could have been that and would have showed how much love and admiration fans had for the performer in doing so.

Compare how “Bohemian Rhapsody” ends and how “Elvis” the movie ends, where two years before his death Elvis tells Priscilla he is all “out of dreams.”

“I’m gonna be 40 soon. 40. And no one’s going to remember me,” Elvis tells her. “I’ve never done anything lasting. Never made a classic film I can be proud of.”

This is not how I wanted to remember the “King of Rock and Roll.”

Instead of being a celebration of the life of a beloved music icon, Luhrmann’s “Elvis”, joins that “gone too soon” list of past biopics (“The Doors” – 1991, “Wired” – 1991, “Judy” – 2019, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” – 2022, and “Back to Black” – 2024) designed to make diehard fans not only saddened but angry that such beloved stars threw their talents away on the evils of addiction and life’s excesses.

I don’t need a depressing two-hour plus biopic to enjoy the music Elvis gave us along with Jim Morrison, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse as well as the films of Judy Garland and John Belushi to appreciate their talents.

Butler’s Elvis was right about one thing when he talks of his needing to make the most of his fame while he can.

“This could all be over in a flash,” he says.

The only question Luhrmann’s “Elvis” leaves is one I have yet to hear anyone who’s seen this movie more than once give me a justifiably good answer.

Where is the joy in watching a biopic about a rock and roll icon who lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse?

©6/19/24

“Why rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun?”

When a representative for the Class of 1988 responsible for putting together the 20th high school reunion in 2008 called asking if I would be attending, my response was a mix of what actors Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald told director/co-star Andrew McCarthy when he asked them if they’d like to be interviewed for his documentary on their “Brat Pack” days back in the mid-1980s called "Brats".

“She (Ringwald) said she’d think about it but that she’d probably like to keep looking forward,” McCarthy said.

Though he “politely declined” McCarthy’s offer, Nelson’s response sounded too direct. Like he had no love to revisit that time almost four decades ago.

“Why kind of rebirth something that wasn’t necessarily fun,” the reclusive actor told Us Weekly. “He’s (McCarthy) a nice guy, but I hadn’t seen him in 35 years. And it’s like, I’m not going be like, ‘Hey!’ No dude.”

Emilio Estevez, who starred with McCarthy, Nelson, along with Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe and Mare Winningham in “St. Elmo’s Fire” (1985) about seven college graduates struggling to make something of themselves in the real world, agreed to be interviewed but only because McCarthy called him.

“I’m not interested in revisiting, which is why I’m not interested in, you know, dredging up the past because I think if you’re too busy looking in your rearview mirror and looking at what’s behind you, you’re going to stumble trying to move forward,” Estevez said in the documentary.

Bishop Lynch Class of 1988

I understand where they came from, especially Nelson. If “Brats” had come out in 2008 instead of 2024, my response to that Class of ‘88 representative would have been the same as the actor. I would have “politely declined” though I probably would have uttered a sarcastic comment before hanging up. I found it to be one thing to be told about the 20th reunion but then to be told if I wanted to go there’d be a fee involved. Ok, ok! The fee was to pay for the place the class was holding the party at. But still.

I’ve made it no secret I loathed my high school years when I attended Bishop Lynch in Dallas from 1984-88. I only liked freshman year because it was a new chapter in my life as I hailed from out of state and knew no one so, to some extent maybe, I stress the word, maybe, the experience was exciting. By the time senior year began in August ’87, I was counting down the months to May ’88 when those four years would be over and could close the book on that less than satisfying chapter of my life.

So, to quote Nelson, why “rebirth something that was not much fun to begin with” twenty years later when I got that fateful phone call in 2008?

Like getting a junior ring, for example, during the 86-87 school year. I threw away that money. I didn’t learn until 25-years later just how much I threw away on that ring when I tried selling it to a pawn shop for money and the dealer laughed and handed it back to me. There’s 100 bucks or more I won’t see again!

I didn’t need a ring to prove I was going to be a senior the following year like this was some sort of rite of passage. To quote postal carrier, Newman (Wayne Knight), from “Seinfeld” (1989-1998) when asked why he didn’t deliver mail in the rain, “I was never big on creeds.”

I only got the damn thing because everyone in class was getting one! And I know I’d get grief from my parents who’d wonder why I wanted no part of Bishop Lynch history. The ring now sits in a storage bin with all the high school newspapers and yearbooks, none of which I am ever going to go through again. Not even when I move unless my significant other feels like dredging up the past.

In high school not only was I not an athlete, but I was also not an athletic supporter. I was, however, a fan of the brigade whose attire was the black and white over-the-knee skirts and their three-inch high heeled white boots. To quote Al Bundy from “Married… with Children” (1987-1997) on his reason for being a fan of the British spy series, “The Avengers" (1961-1969) was all because of Emma Peel, my reason for liking the ladies of the BL Brigade was because they “kicked really high.”

Imagine my disappointment when I attended the alumni party at the 2015 homecoming/football game that the brigade was not only smaller watching them perform during the halftime show but gone were those white Go-Go boots replaced by white cowgirl boots and the black and white outfits no longer looked “domineering.” They were now like every other high school brigade team. They no longer stood apart.

Course I only attended the alumni party that year out of curiosity to see what the campus looked like now with all the new buildings added, all of which I’m sure was paid for by the $20,000 tuition parents pay now to send their kids there versus the $5000 my parents paid to send me from 84-88.

I didn’t bury the hatchet and let sleeping dogs lie with the past until the 30th reunion came in 2018. Like McCarthy’s documentary, “Brats” where my interest was not who appeared in the film, but who didn’t, I took note at the reunion of who was missing than I did on those who attended. Some likely already had plans that weekend and skipped. Others just blew it off.

Class of 1988 - 2018 30th Reunion

When someone at the reunion asked about why so-so person was not there, one of the class reps said she talked to that former student who was among the more popular ones in our class. That person, who has a family and lives out of state told her he was done reminiscing about the high school days and that part of his life was over. She sounded hurt when he told her that.

I don’t blame that classmate though. He’s not the only one, nor am I. There’s probably one, if not several who don’t want to look back on the past.

I’ve not seen two of my friends from high school since before 2006 while the other, Joel Mathews, I saw back at the 30th. All of us still live in the same state. One of them, Kelly Reed, suggested how the four of us should plan a trip together like to either New Orleans or Las Vegas. That was six years ago.

I already believe such a reunion to be nothing more than wishful thinking. The kind of wishful thinking fans of the “Fab Four” hoped would happen in their lifetime after The Beatles broke up in 1970 only to have it all tragically end ten years later.

By comparison, perhaps the only possibility of us getting together again is when one of us leaves this world. The way my health has been since 2015 (five hospital stays now for diabetes) the first person to become one with “The Force” or. in my case the “Dark Side of the Force” out of the four of us will likely be me.

I’ve no idea if I will show up for the 40th high school reunion in 2028. That’s four years from now. I have enough trouble figuring out what I’m going to do tomorrow.

The 30th may well have been it for me. And like Judd Nelson said, why rebirth something forty years later I didn’t find all that enjoyable forty years ago.

©6/12/24