Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in Moneyball: “Would you rather get one shot in the head or five to the chest and bleed to death?”

Brand to Bean: (beat) “Are those my only two options?”

In Titan submersible “you’re fucked” terms, would you rather die instantly from a catastrophic implosion (and I mean so fast you probably wouldn’t even have a half-second to say “oh, shit!” before hearing the angels sing) or would you rather die slowly from a lack of breathable oxygen and grapple with all the psychological torment and panic that goes with that?

If (and I say “if“) the five travellers perished from a submersible implosion, they obviously, in a manner of speaking and given an either-or death scenario…they caught a kind of break. Compared to the other agonizing option, I mean. If the sub imploded, they wound up dying faster and smoother than any of us probably will.

Reported by The Daily Mail‘s Martin Robinson, Rory Tingle, Darren Boyle and Jen Smith / Updated at 13:24, 6.22.23:

“The landing frame and rear cover of the missing Titan submersible have been discovered on the ocean floor, according to experts involved in the search. [The experts] say it points to the vessel suffering a ‘catastrophic implosion‘ that will have claimed all five of the lives on board.

“The US Coast Guard announced on Twitter that the ‘debris field’ had been found on Thursday.

“They are yet to confirm what was found, but Richard Garriott, President of the Explorers’ Club, tells DailyMail.com his understanding from the teams involved in the search is that those items were found.

“It would mean the sub suffered a crack and imploded, killing all five men on board instantly.

“A debris field implies there’s a break up of the submersible and at that depth, because we know that they lost communications at around [garbled] so that really indicates what is the worst case scenario which is a catastrophic failure, an implosion.

“The only saving grace is that it would have been immediate, literally in milliseconds and the men would have no idea what was happening,’ David Mearns, a friend of two of the men on board, said during an appearance on Sky News in the UK this evening. He added: ‘My worst fears have now been realized.’

“A Boston press conference has been scheduled for 3pm EST (10pm BST) where the Coast Guard said it would discuss the ‘findings’.

“It brings a devastating development to the search mission, which had been emphatically categorized as rescue effort — and not a recovery — by US officials. The world has been praying for a ‘miracle’ after rescuers estimated the vital oxygen supply would end at 7.08am EST (12.08pm UK time).

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.

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:

Reported around 5 pm (6.20) by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs for the N.Y. Times: “A spokesman for OceanGate confirms that Stockton Rush, its chief executive, was piloting the company’s vessel that is lost in the North Atlantic. All five occupants have now been identified.”

Reported around 3 pm (6.20) by Emma Bubola and Anushka Patil of N.Y. Times: “Hamish Harding, a British explorer aboard the submersible missing in the North Atlantic, acknowledged in a 2021 interview that he had taken on deep-sea missions in the past knowing that rescue would not be an option.

“If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” Harding told the Indian newsmagazine The Week after he made a record-setting trip to Challenger Deep, the furthest depths of the Mariana Trench. At almost seven miles, the Mariana Trench is far deeper than the Titanic site that the submersible was set to visit, which is about two-and-a half miles down.”

Journalists and editors being fallible, articles in the entertainment realm sometimes contain wrongos. Misspelled titles and names, misleading plot synopses, bad release dates, etc. What matters is how quickly the errors are spotted and corrected.

Last Saturday (6.17) Vanity Fair‘s Jordan Hoffman posted a fluff piece about the half-century-old relationship between Godfather collaborators Francis Coppola and Diane Keaton (“Diane Keaton Asks Francis Ford Coppola a Question 50+ Years in the Making“). Hoffman flubbed the title of Coppola’s forthcoming Megalopolis, spelling it Megapolis.

This wasn’t a felony. But his Vanity Fair editors never fixed it, and now this dumb-ass misspelling has been sitting on the site for four days — Saturday (6.17), Sunday (6.18), Monday (6.19) and today (6.20). It would have been mildly embarassing if the Vanity Fair editors hadn’t corrected the misspelling until Sunday, let’s say, but four days of inaction? These guys are out to lunch.

This signifies something, I fear. It probably signifies that people don’t care very much about Megalopolis. If they did somebody would’ve spotted the error last weekend. (If a journalist had written an article in early 1979 about Coppola’s forthcoming Apothecary Now, an editor would have instantly fixed it.) This probably means that when Megalopolis finally opens, people are going to watch it listlessly, half-attuned, perhaps in a slumbering mode.