All the Elvis Movies #29. Thanks for hanging in with me through my tour of some of the worst music-based films ever made. I wouldn't call them 'musicals' as such because an 'Elvis movie' is pretty much a genre of its own. Anyway, I'm almost there. After this, I only have three to go.
One thing I have learned. Norman Taurog directed the worst Elvis films and this one is no exception. Live a Little, Love a Little also has a weirdness factor you wouldn't believe. It's as though David Lynch made an Elvis movie. Elvis plays a photographer who is being stalked by Bernice (Michelle Carey) a woman with multiple personality disorder (and a Great Dane) who is sexually available but has never actually had sex. So rather than the usual scenario where Elvis is a sex pest, here the roles are reversed. Bernice (she has half a dozen other names as well) accosts Greg on the beach, forces him into the surf and uses her dog to keep him in the water until he is near frozen to death, then takes him back to her apartment and drugs him. He sleeps for three days and has a fever dream in which a man dressed in a dog costume leads him down a bizarre rabbit hole involving multiple version of his psychopathic captor. Eventually Greg 'makes her a woman' (excuse me while I find something to thrown up in) by basically forcing himself on her in a fit of petulance. Of course by the end of the film, in spite of all her creepy sociopathic behaviour, Greg falls in love with Bernice and we're expected to believe that these two live happily ever after. I'd give them a month.
There's a lame subplot where Greg secretly tries to hold down two jobs dashing back and forth between two different floors of a building to fulfil obligations on different film shoots. One of the magazines is a Playboy style publication which provides plenty of opportunity for the most egregious mid-century sexism. The film has only one saving grace (hence the two stars) - it has some great songs (though only four of them). 'Edge of Reality' and 'A Little Less Conversation' are late-sixties classics for the king and the latter was so good it was a hit in two different decades (the dance remix hitting the charts in 2002). Even the cocktail bar vibe of 'Almost in Love' has a kind of cool Austin Powers vibe (well the whole movie does really.
Though it is marginally more like a 'real' movie than most Elvis movies (mostly due to outdoor locations being preferred to the usual process screen backgrounds), Live a Little, Love a Little is just too bat s**t crazy and misogynistic to really appeal to audiences at this late stage in the development of human consciousness.
One thing I have learned. Norman Taurog directed the worst Elvis films and this one is no exception. Live a Little, Love a Little also has a weirdness factor you wouldn't believe. It's as though David Lynch made an Elvis movie. Elvis plays a photographer who is being stalked by Bernice (Michelle Carey) a woman with multiple personality disorder (and a Great Dane) who is sexually available but has never actually had sex. So rather than the usual scenario where Elvis is a sex pest, here the roles are reversed. Bernice (she has half a dozen other names as well) accosts Greg on the beach, forces him into the surf and uses her dog to keep him in the water until he is near frozen to death, then takes him back to her apartment and drugs him. He sleeps for three days and has a fever dream in which a man dressed in a dog costume leads him down a bizarre rabbit hole involving multiple version of his psychopathic captor. Eventually Greg 'makes her a woman' (excuse me while I find something to thrown up in) by basically forcing himself on her in a fit of petulance. Of course by the end of the film, in spite of all her creepy sociopathic behaviour, Greg falls in love with Bernice and we're expected to believe that these two live happily ever after. I'd give them a month.
There's a lame subplot where Greg secretly tries to hold down two jobs dashing back and forth between two different floors of a building to fulfil obligations on different film shoots. One of the magazines is a Playboy style publication which provides plenty of opportunity for the most egregious mid-century sexism. The film has only one saving grace (hence the two stars) - it has some great songs (though only four of them). 'Edge of Reality' and 'A Little Less Conversation' are late-sixties classics for the king and the latter was so good it was a hit in two different decades (the dance remix hitting the charts in 2002). Even the cocktail bar vibe of 'Almost in Love' has a kind of cool Austin Powers vibe (well the whole movie does really.
Though it is marginally more like a 'real' movie than most Elvis movies (mostly due to outdoor locations being preferred to the usual process screen backgrounds), Live a Little, Love a Little is just too bat s**t crazy and misogynistic to really appeal to audiences at this late stage in the development of human consciousness.