Halfway into a story about a few likely or at least promising 2023 Venice Film Festival highlights, Variety’s Elsa Keslassy has almost begrudgingly mentioned that Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance has been invited to screen outside competition.

This is admittedly a day late and a dollar short, but yesterday Brian Wilson celebrated his 81st birthday. On the very same day Sutton Wells, aged 19 months, was dancing in her bedroom to that Pet Sounds instrumental track (i.e., the second-to-last cut, just before “Caroline No”). Will someone please send this to Brian already? Seriously.

In keeping with the general wokester view that older white guys are evil, and especially so if they’re wealthy, Melissa Hung recently complained about receiving three N.Y. Times alerts about the lost (and apparently still missing) OceanGate submersible vs. zero alerts about the week-old (4.26) drowning of 55 Libyan migrants after their boat capsized and sank.

Hung’s lament sounds like a close relation of that classic joke about what to call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean. Answer: A good start.

It’s now 5:30 pm eastern on Wednesday, 6.21. The oxygen supply aboard the Titan is due to run out around 10 am on Thursday morning. If they’re still alive, the five trapped travellers (British billionaire Hamish Harding, OceanGate honcho Stockton Rush, French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood) have about 16 hours of breathable air left as we speak. To the best of my knowledge the submsersible hasn’t even been located; the odds of finding it and somehow hauling it to the surface seem astronomical.

Warner Bros. Discovery, under the command of untrustworthy buccaneer David Zaslav, has begun to weaken and undermine Turner Classic Movies, beginning with 100 employees (overseen by Kathleen Finch) cut loose. TCM general manager Pola Changnon, a 25-year veteran, is ankling TCM.

I feel the same outrage as everyone else, but can someone help me understand Zaslav’s thinking? He talked a good supportive game during a panel discussion at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival, and now he’s whipped around and wreaked havoc.

Zaslav doesn’t have an apparent argument with TCM’s film lover programming — he does, however, seem to have a beef with TCM’s spread sheet, due to on-demand streaming and new financial realities. But TCM represents a fundamental faith among movie-culture fanatics, and killing this channel is wrong, wrong, terribly wrong.

I’ve never once watched the Turner Classic Movies channel — really, not once — but I recognize the value and importance that it occupies in the hearts of film lovers everywhere.

So the dinky eyebrowless gremlin in charge of Warner Bros. is gutting TCM, one of their most beloved brands?

What an utter nincompoop. pic.twitter.com/iVG64Perqv

— Movies Silently 🐀 (@MoviesSilently) June 21, 2023

Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24, 10.23) is about Priscilla Presley‘s relationship with Elvis Presley, starting with their first meeting in 1959 (when Priscilla was 14), continuing through their 1967 marriage and the 1968 birth of the now-deceased Lisa Marie, and presumably ending (I’ve no clear idea) with Elvis’s death in August 1977.

How, you may ask, will Coppola’s film pass the bullshit test given that (a) it’s based upon Priscilla Presley’s “Elvis and Me (’85),” a suspicious and almost certainly sanitized account of her life with Elvis, (b) the fact that Priscilla is an executive producer on the film, and (c) the possibility that Coppola will adopt the same (or perhaps a similar) mindset that informed her highly fanciful and historically inaccurate Marie Antoinette (’06), another film about a woman who comes to enjoy privilege and splendor by marrying a wealthy and powerful man (i.e., Louis XVI) — a work of impressionism that was obviously not meant to be factual.

And forget about what the #MeToo wokesters will say…pedophilia! depravity! Priscilla was a total victim! Sasha Stone mined this aspect of things a few hours ago.

Before we get into the particulars, consider the fact that the actual Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 4’11” Cailee Spaeny and Elvis is played by the 6’5″ Jacob Elordi.

Elordi, in short, is 18 inches taller than Spaeny — nearly a foot beyond the eight inches that existed in real life. This in itself pretty much destroys the boundaries of realism. At what point do giant-vs.-midget marriages become visually ludicrous? What if Elordi was 6’7″ and Spaeny was 4’10”, or separated by 21 inches? Spaney is too shrimpy to begin with. She’s the size of a nine-year-old.

I haven’t read Priscilla’s book, but it reportedly presents a well-scrubbed portrait of her sexual life with Elvis. Some biographers believe that Presley was almost immediately intimate with Priscilla, who was 14 when they met in Germany, when Presley was serving in the Army. Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker claimed that their relationship was chaste and proper until Priscilla came of age…HE says bullshit.

According to Alanna Nash‘s “Baby, Let’s Play House“, a seemingly credible, well-written 2009 book, reports that the sexually insecure Presley was totally into “cherries,” as he called them — girls who were barely pubescent.

The same view is held by Presley biographers Susan Finstad, author of “Child Bride,” and Joel Williamson, author of “A Southern Life”.

Presley was apparently more into erotic fiddling around than becoming an actual conquistador. But carnal knowledge is carnal knowledge.

A 14 year-old named Frances Forbes and two girlfriends (Gloria Mowel, Heidi Heissen) participated in “pajama parties” with Presley, Nash’s book says. “Elvis didn’t pay any attention to me [when I was 13], but when I was 14, he noticed me,’ Forbes says. “14 was a magical age with Elvis. It really was.”

In 1960 Presley reportedly fiddled around with Sandy Ferra, the 14-year-old daughter of the owner of the Cross Bow nightclub in L.A.’s Panorama City. In 1974, when Presley was 39, he took up with 14-year-old Reeca Smith.

“Jailbait Confidential,” posted on 10.30.22: If you’re talking inappropriate violations of way-too-young girls in the 1950s, is there really a substantial difference between 23-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis marrying a 13-year-old cousin (obviously not cool but then Lewis and Myra Gale Brown stayed together for 12 years) and 24 year-old Elvis Presley doing the nasty with Priscilla Beaulieu in 1959, when she was 14?

The difference is that Presley and manager Tom Parker kept the particulars under wraps while Lewis stupidly admitted everything.

From “Jerry Lee Lewis’s Life of Rock and Roll and Disrepute,” a 10.29.22 New Yorker piece by Tom Zito: