Sinners was not just nominated for best Picture this year, it was the most nominated movie in the history of the Academy Awards. It received 16 nominations, but it did not win the award for best pictures. As jambalaya is a jumble of seafood, spices, veggies and sauce, so this film is partly horror, action, philosophy, and music, but in my view not as tasty. Even vampires and machine guns could not do it for me. It has its moments, especially with the music, but I did not find it satisfying.

The narrator of the film makes an important comment near the beginning of the film: “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it could pierce the veil between life and death.”  That would be music! Maybe the blues musicians of America qualify. They certainly have a lot of power and this film celebrates them and their power. I just did not think the film was that true.

In Clarksdale Mississippi Preacherboy Sammy attended a black gospel church where the preacher accused him of sinning but said he had come to the right place, because the people in the church had been called to be “fishers of men who sin” and he asked Preacherboy to drop his guitar and come to the lord and give up sin.

The day before the preacher had warned Preacherboy Sammy, “You keep dancin’ with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” All Sammy wanted to do was play that true music.  And he was willing to pay the price.

The film centres around the twins. 2 black men from Chicago named Stack and Smoke.  Gangsters? Maybe. The twins are both played by Michael B. Jordan, a competent actor. They come down south from Chicago to start a juke joint where music like that can release the joy of the Delta. One of those musicians, Delta Slim, said “I play and I get as much corn liquor as I can drink, a sinner can’t ask for more than that.” He also says, “White folks like the Blues just fine. They just don’t like the folks that make it.” When a friend of his was lynched and emasculated his reaction was to play the music and drink. What else could he do? Slim also said, “The Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. We brought this with us from home. Its magic what we do. It’s sacred. And big.” All of that is true.

Smoke advises Preacherboy to stop being a blues singer: “I met plenty of singers and never met a happy one.” Of course,  Smoke does not understand that no one sings the blues to get happy.

The film is filled with evil spirits in the film who talk nice urging us to be kind and “we is one people” but they are not nice. As Shakespeare said, “one can smile and smile and be a villain.” Smoke understands this saying, “Something ain’t adding up.” As one of the characters says, sometimes the soul gets stuck in the body and we are “Cursed to live here with all this hate. Can’t even feel the warmth of a sunrise.” When Pearline becomes a vampire she says, speaking like a true jihadi, “We’re family. After we kill you all we’re going to have heaven right here on earth.”

But there are some real vampires. They are men who speak of “Uppity niggers.” There is even a resurrection of sorts involving members of the Klan, but Smoke arrives and like a true American hero shoots them all with an assault rifle. This is the American way with American superheroes. This is the way to solve all problems. Shoot them up.

At the end of the film, Stack says that day was the best day of his life. “For just a few hours, we was free.” Even though it ended in bloody violence. I endorse what old Preacherboy, played masterfully by Buddy Guy, does at the end of the film, when 2 vampires come into the bar and offer him a devil’s bargain. “I can make it so you can continue touring. No pain.”  But Preacherboy says, “I think I’ve had enough of this place.” By then I was like that.  I think I had enough of this film. Besides singers of the Blues need pain.

The film is filled with great performances, awesome power, and technical skill. It just seems to me it was all for nought. Maybe someone can tell me where I went wrong in my failed appreciation. It did however have one redeeming feature. I really liked the music. There is no holding it back. Even the violence can’t do that. The music made it all worthwhile. It was worth the trip. But did I have to go through hell and back to get there?

This film magnificently captures the electric sexual energy of a poor white boy from the American south.  This was the exciting and hence dangerous energy that the establishment whites closely associated with African Americans and it frightened them.  They called Elvis “a white boy with black hips.” And they did not like it. Particularly, they hated to see good white girls lavishly enthralled by this energy. One white man called his music “voodoo devil music.”  That’s how dangerous it was. To them it harboured the irrational revolution of the youth against the old, and black against white.

Those like me who mainly remember only the late Elvis of the Las Vegas years and mild smarmy Hollywood movies forget what a revolutionary force he was in his youth. There was nothing like it and this film, and in particular the actor who plays Elvis, Austin Butler, brings it directly to us without filters or banisters. And it is excitingly thrilling. Butler must be considered a serious contender for best Actor and the film  for Best Picture. This film is a marvel of cinematic art that brought this young Elvis to us. I loved this film. I was surprised by this film. I don’t know what I was expecting, probably because, I like so many, remember most clearly the vapid Las Vegas Elvis who was by then a pale afterthought of the kinetic youthful Elvis.

A major character in the film is Colonel Tom Parker (played exceedingly well by Tom Hanks). Frankly, I knew nothing about the Colonel’s role in Elvis’s life, but that just shows you how little I knew about Elvis. As the Colonel said himself, “without me there be no Elvis, yet there are some who make me out the villain of this story.”  This film is brought to us through the eyes of that low class but powerful salesman who liked nothing better than to snow people, or worse. “Elvis was the showman; Parker the snowman.”  The Colonel snowed the public into buying the Elvis he created.

The Colonel deserved credit for seeing the potential of Elvis right from the start. He knew it by looking into the faces of swooning young women lost in the rapture of Elvis. It was like religious rapture and was saturated with sexual power. As the Colonel said about one of those  young women staring at Elvis, “She was having feelings she wasn’t sure she should be having.” These carnal delights however filled the white men of the south with deep fear. They did all they could to stop him and almost succeeded.  But Elvis’ energy could not be denied. Even his very religious mother came to see the light. As she said, “the way you move is God-given, so it can’t be bad.”

Elvis knew that he was “ready to fly.” He acknowledged that “if I can’t move, I can’t sing.”  The Colonel tried to rein in Elvis to make him presentable to stiff necked southern white men and that was a massive mistake, but who knows what would have happened if he had let Elvis loose. As a result, the Colonel allowed Elvis to serve his 2 years of mandatory Army service and come out of the war a clean-cut American kid. By then Elvis was ready for an array of  sun-cleaned and bloodless Hollywood films that made him a lot of money, but in my opinion, at the cost of his soul. Elvis strafed at the restrictions imposed on him by the Colonel including an NBC special where the Colonel contractually bound Elvis to sing a vapid Christmas song and Elvis revolted.

Fortunately, the film does not resolve these tensions on Elvis just as they were not resolved in his life. Elvis lived those tensions and they contributed to his early demise. Like so many rock and rollers, he died too young.

But he sure could rock and roll.