Elvis Has Left the Building (2004)

One of my all time favorites.

Boring

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

The acting in this movie is really good.

That cameo was the only time I laughed in the whole movie. Not at the gag in the scene, but by how colossally stupid the cameo was.The gags...are not even gags. The delivery is so inept.The script...the romance is like the romance between two nine year olds. I know it's supposed to be light, but I expect a little conversation, or even interaction on any level so I can suspend my disbelief. Funny premise. That's it. The delivery is so slow, laboured, dwelling on all the wrong moments. Even the gags are framed incorrectly (which at times even confuses the scene so you can't even tie it to the premise).The director seems to have made a career from tv sitcoms. I wouldn't hire this guy to shoot a ten second ad

This film is like a jigsaw puzzle put together with the pieces from 5 different boxes, so nothing fits together and the end result is an awkward mess. Box #1 is a darkly comic take on the Elvis impersonator phenomenon and the pathetic people who take it way too seriously. Box #2 is a plaintive spin on a woman looking for love after a lifetime consumed by her job as a cosmetics saleswoman. The third set of pieces are about that same woman's odd relationship with Elvis Pressley, complete with flashbacks to Elvis-involved moments from her childhood and an internal monologue where she talks to The King like he was her guardian angel. Even more parts of the story revolve around the struggles of an advertising executive trying to do his job with some creative integrity, of all things, and appear to be in the movie solely because Sean Astin, of all people, agreed to take a supporting role. And the fifth concept that got chopped up and ungracefully jammed into Elvis Has Left The Building is two FBI agents straight out of an off Broadway revival of The Odd Couple. Oh, and there's a gay character who would have been a boring stereotype in 1994, let alone a decade later when this thing was made.Harmony Jones (Kim Basinger) is a traveling saleswoman on a tour of the Great American Southwest, trying to recruit other women to start pushing Pink Lady Cosmetics. A childhood encounter with Elvis has left her with a lifelong, emotional bond with the music legend that starts sweet and turns satirical when Harmony starts running into Elvis impersonators as they accidentally kill themselves. That's what brings in two mismatched federal agents (Mike Starr and Phill Lewis) to investigate the death spree. There's also the handsome ad man (John Corbett) on his way to Las Vegas to drop off his soon-to-be-ex-wife's Elvis costume who runs into Harmony and instantly chases after her like a starving dog after a pound of hamburger. The ad man is also constantly on the phone with his assistant in New York (Sean Astin), arguing over how trashy a new campaign should be.Kim Basinger always has a certain appeal and if someone with some talent had been brought in to radically rewrite this horrible script, taking Harmony, John Corbett's character and the whole Elvis motif and excising pretty much everything else, maybe director Joel Zwick could have used that to make a romantic comedy that didn't stink on ice. Elvis Has Left The Building is so inept, I'd bet money that it never occurred to credited writers Mitchell Ganem and Adam-Michael Garber how much the name Harmony Jones sounds like something out of 1970s "blaxploitation" flick. Their plot is dependent on people behaving like morons. They wouldn't know a good joke if it landed on their head like an Acme anvil squashing Wile E. Coyote. At least 50% of the scenes they've written here should have never been shot, forget about left on the cutting room floor.Normally, a bad movie has several bad things about it. Elvis Has Left The Building has only one flaw but this awful script is so terrible that it drags everything else down like cement shoes on a Mafia informant. If you ever wanted evidence that no one in the movie business knows a good screenplay from a bad one, look no further. Not that you should actually watch this fiasco, of course.

This is a comedy of coincidence, where Kim Basinger is a traveling saleswoman for the Pink Lady cosmetics company, driving a pink Cadillac and wearing pink all over. Add to this horror the bad taste of Elvis impersonators appearing everywhere and the fact that whenever Kim is around some Elvis impersonator dies accidentally, and you have a wacky comedy.Of course, there is a bit of romantic comedy hidden in this movie, a bit of the "neorealist" trend with the two investigating cops being the complete opposite of each other and also a couple, talking even more nonsense than Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction. But the main theme of the movie seems to me the breakthrough of life from the sea of mediocre bad taste.In the end Kim wears black, finds her true love and Elvis takes revenge on the silly people emulating him. Can't say it's a good movie, but it has that bit of originality that makes it stand out. And it's fun, too, if you don't feel the need for something profound.

Okay, it's not Spielberg, but it's a little movie that's a lot of fun. Competent performances by Basinger and Corbett certainly help sell the premise, but it's a screwball comedy a la "The Russians Are Coming". Besides, how bad could a dark comedy be whose focus is on an Elvis impersonator convention? Help comes in many forms including appearances by Denise Richards, Angie Dickenson, Pat Morita, Richard Kind, and Annie Potts. Other cameos spice things a bit. If don't mind spending 90 minutes on a little quirky movie that delivers a few good laughs and a lot of amusing moments rent the DVD. It's worth it. This last line is in here because IMDb makes you write ten lines.