Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 2022 Elvis biopic has Austin Butler giving a career-defining performance inside a form that couldn't contain what it was trying to say. Three films about extraordinary artists. Three completely different formal approaches. And a structural argument about why the biopic — the most commercially reliable form for telling stories about artists — is almost constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about them. This is the synthesis.
","author_name":"Required Watching"}