_Rocketman_ -- the Elton John biopic! Starring...Tom Hardy!

Wait, what?

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120713050102/villains/images/2/25/BaneTDKR.jpg

"Yes, your table is waiting, sir. Plus the cocaine and the piano."

looking forward to the scene where Elton beats Tim Rice into a bloody pulp

Dressed like this

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxzkdvIqjj1qb30kv.png

"Can you feel the love tonight? YOU WILL."

I would love it if Hardy went full method and just wore a giant Donald Duck suit around 24/7 while filming

Seems like Elton needs the I'm Not There treatment more than whatever straightforward biopic this will be.

ned why do you always type Wait, what?

We all have our crutches.

bump

Could go either way i suppose (uh-oh 'fantasy' elements lol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84bnDw9MnrQ

god i fucking hate taron egerton

what's gonna be worse, the queen biopic starring mr rowboat or this?

Is Taron Egerton Ansel Elgort? Or is he Alden Ehrenreich? Or Joel Edgerton?

god that singing is horrid

yeah wow i cannot imagine a whole film of someone sounding THAT little like elton john while portraying elton john. just dub him over for crying out loud.

can't see how an elton john biopic starring someone who neither looks nor sounds like elton john could be anything other than box office gold

haha that singing.. but hey it worked for Walk The Line.

full trailer! looks like shit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3vO8E2e6G0

Dexter Fletcher also directed this, i say "also" since of course he was the director who was brought in to finish up Bohemian Rhapsody.

taron egerton: why

is that sammy davis jr. giving elton some advice?

Surprise! This was...actually pretty great from where I sit. At the least it easily beats the snot out of Bohemian Rhapsody as a film by leaning into being a proper movie musical with actual staging and choreography. Upends the need for exact chronology or history (or any total pretense otherwise), and the full on dream/fantasia moments just make sense as a result. And Egerton carried the film pretty handily. Sure it's Elton telling his own story the way he wants it told and seen, but arguably that's also why it works.

That said, there are Walk Hardisms at points but again, nothing like BR's abuse of them.

I agree with Ned!

It integrates the bio with the music really well, and I didn’t think I would enjoy the songs being deployed in some truly bizarre narrative ways but Fletcher’s light & whimsical touch just fucking ~works~

I laughed, cried, sang etc

Also:
I LOATHED both Kingsman movies on a deep spiritual level and had no desire to see this until I read Elton’s Guardian column last week. I am here to say that Egerton crushed this. CRUSHED. Acting, singing - it worked. He wasn’t impersonating Elton so much as giving the feeling of Elton, and inhabiting the emotion somehow... I dunno.. it sounds lame when I try to explain it but I was captivated start to finish.
Plus i think now maybe he’s kinda hot!?

Robb Stark is excellent as his hott & total dick manager & Jamie Bell’s Bernie is just so lovely & chill & has such good chemistry with Egerton.

But yeah I could watch this a bunch more times

oh and it kinda did what Fosse/Verdon did by making a musical movie that hits the beats of a biopic but plays in many ways like a stage show...lots of fourth wall breaking & bursting into song that was delightful

costume & sets were A++++

Said Guardian column:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/26/elton-john-in-my-own-words-exclusive-my-life-and-making-rocketman

DON: We're delighted that our friend Elton, whom we know from our days at the Troubadour, is finally getting another moment of popular acclaim in a picture that reflects the imagination of Bernie Taupin's magnificent lyrics.

GHOST OF GLENN: Bernie Taupin's imagination didn't surpass myself and Don's, I can tell you that, especially after it was monster time!

DON: Well, yeah.

Bernie’s on board too

http://time.com/5598308/bernie-taupin-rocketman-elton-john/

how does it play as a gay lib story, given that EJ's 'worthwhile' music was all composed in the closet?

Robb Stark is excellent as his hott & total dick manager

He's from the same neighbourhood as me, I think before he bought her a house his mammy lived in the high flats at the end of our road, John Reid that is, not Richard Madden... though Richard Madden's only from 3 or 4 miles away!

John Reid, who's in this and the Queen biopic and, I imagine, is a dick in both.

xxpost Morbs i think it handles it really well, imo better than anything i have seen in that it allows his gayness to be part of his story quite early and on throughout the movie; that is the movie itself doesn’t participate in the closet if that makes sense?

I can't escape the sense that the 2001 video for "This Train Don't Stop" starring Justin Timberlake and Paul Reubens covers this same terrain in five minuts.

pvmic also rmde @ you

does the film show Elton chugging martinis with Duran Duran or

he chugs martinis just not with duran duran

:(

:D

its true there is no duran duran but i swear on the bible his thighs alone are worth the ticket price
yes i just turned this Elton John biopic into a thirst pic

that is my superpower

Per Morbs's question above -- it did what I thought was a clever/wrenching moment as well, when there's a 'protagonist builds up the courage to tell his mother who he really is' scene where the expected 'I already knew' beat happens but then she pulls something totally crushing on him anyway.

He wasn’t impersonating Elton so much as giving the feeling of Elton

A good example of this to my mind was the bit where he was backstage before the Royal Albert Hall show trying to force himself into smiling-entertainer mode looking in the mirror. Both happy and downbeat looks *read* as Elton perfectly, the tooth gap and the hair/glasses acted as perfect signifiers but Egerton didn't just rely on them.

yeah that is an excellent example

this was excellent, completely blown away. Everything BR did wrong, this did right, starting with discarding the attempt to slavishly follow historical points of interest to the point of idiocy (oh here's where we wrote 'we will rock you'); it just launches into full blown musical at the outset, doesn't care one whit about the actual timeline the songs were written in, and focuses on, yeah, the 'feel' of Elton John. It also doesn't once blink in the face of the insalubrious aspects and just makes the entire movie about them. 100% entertaining, worried that the premature praise of BR will overshadow this one come awards season, but this is a better film in every single imaginable way.

I tolerated the "he didn't write that, then" things - this is an entertainment, not a documentary, and in general it was all fine.

The one thing I did think played wrong was the Troubador scene - "Crocodile Rock" would not have won over that audience, but things like "Take me to the Pilot" would have been too obscure, "Honky Tonk Women/Get Back" would just seem to be relying on cover versions, and anything else like "Tiny Dancer" was already slated to provide context for bits of the story later (or, already).

A couple weeks ago I heard the dimwit shock jocks on my local rock radio morning show hyping this movie, and was LOLing at how one of them kept very excitedly saying:

"...and Elton John is the producer, which means he oversaw EVERYTHING, so you know this movie is going to be as ACCURATE AS POSSIBLE to the REAL FACTS OF THE STORY!"

agreed with akm's overall take... I liked it less but what i liked about it was its embrace of nonfactuality and "feel" over dull rock-biopic tropes. maybe i just wanted getting the "feel" to extend more into things like, yeah, the country-western-songwriter-poet-pontifications of the early albums. it rushes the transition to big, wild arena elton. of course it did all happen so fast. and /captain fantastic/ as an album is always there for the version of this story i really want.

still it's just like... it'd be cool, as a music nerd, to get some of the larger musical/cultural context that informed his stage persona. and a sense of why he connected so much with an audience at a particular time and place. the movie leans into the timeless magic of the songs (and, more smartly, the idea that there were things in bernie's lyrics that elton personally would have identified with).... but timeless can also turn into generically contemporized Glee renditions. maybe related: it drains all the rock and roll out of elton, even his loudest, guitariest, rockingest hits. a defensible choice but maybe i just would have dug it being BOTH a biopic of a lonely addict, and some kind of statement about The Seventies.

queer culture also oddly distant and vague --- surely elton got some of his pizzazz from, like, drag? right? or bowie and glam, at the least? i would have even accepted sth like how Velvet Goldmine invents fake eno/ferry/bolan/iggy syntheses that our fake bowie sees early on and goes "aha" at...

I have to say I loved that this ended with a frame by frame reproduction of the I'm Still Standing video in all it's low-rez, 80's beach cheese glory, a great contrast to the grand slavish restaging of Queen's Live Aid performance.

"surely elton got some of his pizzazz from, like, drag? right? or bowie and glam, at the least?"

yeah probably. I mean Elton was never considered glam despite the clothes, as far as I can tell; but he had to have been informed by that and that does seem slightly glossed over, he just jumps head-first into outrageous costuming. I'm disappointed the Donald Duck outfit didn't make an appearance. Much of the 70's excess is really just explored in two fantasy sequences. I guess something had to get condensed.

Also I dn't know much about Egerton, I gather some people above hate him for whatever reason, but he was very good in this, and his singing was great. He didn't sound exactly like John but he did a great job singing these songs.

xxpost -- okay hold on, everyone's been saying it's a recreation of the "I'm Still Standing" video. Isn't it just THE video? The day we saw it, said video was played beforehand at Alamo, so when it reappeared at the end I wasn't thinking "What a marvelous recreation," I was thinking "It's just the video with a slightly different edit, isn't it?"

also really been enjoying the opportunity to revisit the Elton poll threads

honestly the best gift the movie gave me is a) making me enjoy “Honky Cat” and b) all i want to do is listen to his music constantly again & i love that

been playing the Spotify list from the poll pretty frequently.

gotta admit I still don’t know what you people see in Grey Seal lol

oh man i love Gray Seal
it’s lovely pop is what it is

I’m just glad my votes got Holiday Inn and Where to Now St Peter into the rollout

<3

I'm so basic
https://img.discogs.com/-XhbqI1aWmygs56eRGEARqodykU=/fit-in/600x598/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-392937-1253268060.jpeg.jpg

The fact that he’s portrayed by Richard Madden should def be taken as immense flattery lol

^ this

Stunned by how many people like or loved this movie. I thought it was terrible. Such an enormous lack of imagination, and how....HOW can you make an Elton John biopic and not include "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding"? that should've OPENED the movie. not every musician movie needs to go all the way I'm Not There but I was shocked by how few Elton John songs were featured at all- only two from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? I don't get it...it was fine I guess, but that's not enough. I didn't see Bohemian Rhapsody.

It's my fav Elton song but...why, exactly, should it have opened the movie?

Feh. Some Elton fan! If you really were a fan, you'd claim the movie should have opened with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh2hkTzcT7c

this is freaky cause i honestly just now woke up thinking about "heartache all over the world"

Guys. GUYSZ We all know it should have opened with I Wanna Kiss The Bride

"hercules" was maybe the deepest cut to make an appearance... i was pretty stoked at that. still think the Captain Fantastic material overall would have been gold for this. "sartorial eloquence" would have been great for the whole party's-gotten-too-big period.* the sacrificial use of "victim of love" was pretty cool. where exactly in his career is he supposed to be when jerky jerkface tells him he'd sell more records if he weren't recording "MOR shit" --- Blue Moves?

* for some weird reason yesterday, rather than listening to the new taylor swift video, i watched it on mute with "sartorial eloquence" playing. the lipsync didn't work out much but it kinda worked otherwise. a certain star-studded excessiveness.

ooh yeah i should reread the poll threads. how the fuck has it been six years since that?! seems like yesterday. would be worth it just for shakey's schtick of constantly acting surprised and disappointed that bernie has written a passionate, irony-free pastiche, and that elton john sings on it.

It's my fav Elton song but...why, exactly, should it have opened the movie?

― Got your butt drank (Neanderthal), Tuesday, June 18, 2019 4:05 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because it's awesome and starts with an overture

ding ding ding

I watched this on the plane yesterday and I have never cried so much while watching a movie

I cried when he says he's an alcoholic in the first scene
When Bernie very clearly writes "Your Song" about Elton
When he makes his debut at the Troubadour
The sex scene which is like um finally a normal extremely hot gay sex scene in a Hollywood movie
When the dad hugs Elton's half-brothers
When his mom tells him he'll never be loved
When he played "Pinball Wizard"
When Robb Stark turns into an asshole
Literally every time Bernie gazes as Elton with the most intense fraternal adoration
"Bennie And The Jets"
The stark re-arrangement of "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me"
Every single time the orchestral score nodded to the chorus-modulation from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"
When adult Elton hugs his childhood self

And when it was over I was sitting there like, "why do I feel one way about Bowie (overt worship), and feel another way about Elton (sheepish tolerance)". I understand that Bowie was far more successful and pulling a look and Elton was all awkwardness but... I was sitting there, shaken, like "have I forsaken Elton in this weird way by spending as much time lolling about "Honky Cat" as I do worshipping "Daniel"?"

"I'm Still Standing" was used so incredibly, too. idk, overall just a wonderful film.

:D

i found it overwhelmingly emotional too. every time i see it i find more things to cry about

i love when Bernie sings Yellow Brick Road - the arrangement to suit Jamie Bell’s voice, the character etc - and Bell’s voice!

and I like how Taron Egerton can give all those internal emotions just with his eyes & his expression, and the way the anger & insecurity is always right there just below the surface

I appreciated the fact that the filmmakers were deliberately winking at the audience enough to make it clear that "this is fantastical revisionism", no efforts made to conceal the fact that this was a self-aggrandizing piece, and in fact acknowledging it slyly

totally

jamie bell’s accent in this is utterly confounding

That scene in the cafe where they hesitantly share how much they love Country music and then both burst into song at customer-bothering volume was straight-up genius. I could have taken an entire film (Backbeat/Nowhere Boy style) of Bernie and Elton larking around young and drunk in the London suburbs but i was very grateful there were some scenes depicting that at all.

The only real false note for me was.. why on Earth would he randomly have an entirely new and unrehearsed band for that first Troubador show?? Just nitpicking that though.

Best biopic since Walk The Line.

yeah the cafe Streets of Laredo scene is ridic charming, one of my faves

Full length Honky Cat number featuring the full dance number that was cut from the movie

it’s v cute

https://youtu.be/bAX5RzN5b0g

Wowwww

I want to applaud everyone involved from the orchestrator who made it magical to the intern who threw the soccer ball

I just watched this yesterday too - great movie! I wonder how much of Bohemian Rhapsody Fletcher had input on, because this had much bolder direction. It was refreshing to see a biopic embrace the falseness of biopics, and some of the song choices were legit surprising, like I Want Love. Was wondering if even a Lion King song would show up

I don't think Fletcher had much input on BR at all. He finished it up, I believe the majority of the movie was maybe already shot and done.

hmm. I think it was a good call to cut that number. The Busby Berkeley instrumental part doesn't work. The part with the reggae beat isn't great either.

xp that would make sense, the two movies are like night and day

Dex was on board before the movie switched studios, when Ben Whishaw was attached & they were ginning for an R rating. VERY different movie, obv.

But it sounds like he had very little input on the final version when they brought him back - I mean he only worked on the Live Aid portion at the end and a handful of other scenes, and it was mostly just to help them finish shooting.

I was a little taken aback when I read (via a Vulture article? maybe?) that the bits in Rocketman about Elton's mum and dad ("You will never be loved properly" and "no hugs for you, they'll make you soft", respectively) were apocryphal. They did such a good job depicting, frankly, the glorious first blush of gay male flirtation and sexiness and then the descent into callous abuse, all of that was chef's kiss. Why did they need to get all revisionist about his family situation? I get the impulse to do so (drama!) but it felt like a betrayal for people who, like, actually have to deal with that kind of familial rejection. Anyway, whatever, it was really nice to see a movie really Do Gay Justice in the face of Bohemian Rhapsody ignoring it and Call Me By Your Name creating some bizarre white-washed fantasy version of it.

didn't know they were apocryphal; elton and his mother had a completely fucking horrible relationship up to her death though so I can see why he'd be happy to portray her in a negative light.

I think that using Elton’s own memories as the basis for the story allows for more license, and maybe pushing the envelope for added impact - they didn’t factually say it, but it ~felt~ that way? Maybe thats a copout though, idk

i agree that it would be hard to hear as those irl ppl though

and yeah his relationship w his mum was pretty sad

On a separate note: one of my favorite 'because we can' moments in the film is him rocketing up from Dodger Stadium into the passing jet.

I wonder how much of Bohemian Rhapsody Fletcher had input on, because this had much bolder direction

Apart from his BoRhap role being to play cleanup, he'd quit the film originally because he didn't like the script they ended up with, or the sanitised tone. Rocketman is presumably more like what he would have done with Queen if able, but his job on the released Rhapsody was to be anonymous and finish the film that hundreds of ppl were already making, not to suddenly turn it into his own vision.

Enjoying the rush of enthusiasm in this revive, I'll probably check it out sometime based on this.

xpost yeah some of the transitions are really inventive, that one is the most bonkers and a+

I take back my snippy comment on the trailer, this film was wonderful in every sense.
A minor shock to realise I have been listening to the first "Greatest Hits" compilation for 45 years now, Jesus.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENkl3L6XYAI_Duj?format=jpg

Re. his parents. Their depiction here is 10x kinder than the picture he draws in "Me". There's a lot of nasty stuff not mentioned in the movie.

richard the hamster hammond

gail platt

who else does bernie look like

Paul Sturrock.

Finally saw this and was kinda surprised as the movie ended that they couldn’t find any use of “someone saved my life tonight” in the film given how the story was presented.

jamie bell’s accent in this is utterly confounding

Yeah, I had no idea what he was trying to do the entire film.

So what happened to Tom Hardy?

So what happened to Tom Hardy?

so what happened to Tom Hardy?

so what 'appened to Tom 'ardy