"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"Barbara Kopple is one of my favorite filmmakers. What I love about her films is that she gains a unique trust from and access to her subjects. That must be a reflection of the filmmaker and the woman herself. She’s a trailblazer, a role model, and a great director. Harlan County USA won an Academy Award, and while Kopple has made other films, this is seminal viewing. Yes, it’s a great documentary about a coal miners’ strike in 1973, but it’s much more than that. It’s a history lesson about coal miners, and we need to honor that, and not forget the men who died taking coal out of this earth. It’s also a portrait of Eastern Kentucky. The rural atmosphere is captured through songs and stories that harken back to our pioneers. At some point, it becomes not just a great documentary but a testimony to the strength of the women of Harlan County, who are the spine of the film. They risked their lives to keep this strike going. And all the while, the camera is capturing it. A grieving mother at her son’s funeral, a wife pulling a gun out of her bra and saying she’s not giving up, an elderly woman leading a group in singing “Bloody Harlan.” They lost sons and husbands, but they never stopped fighting. If we forget their struggle, and the struggle of all the workers who built this country, we are lost. Harlan County USA should be shown more than it is now, that’s for sure. When I interviewed Kopple about this film, I asked her about the effect that filming these people had on her, and she said, “I learned what it was to be brave.” She used her camera to create social change, and by using her camera to film the women of Harlan County, I believe, she gave them courage. That is the power of film."