Afire premise: A hot, dry summer in a holiday home on the Baltic Sea. Four youngish persons congregate there. Slowly and gradually a forest fire approaches until they’re enclosed by walls of flame. They become closer, and then love, desire and sex overtakes.

The overweight lead male (i.e., “Leon”) is played by Thomas Schubert. Paula Beer is “Nadja,” the lead female.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw wasn’t especially enthused.

Distributors thinking they might be able stream their way to Oscar glory have another think coming. AMPAS is insisting that they commit and re-commit to theatrical bookings. Sounds good to me.

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.

In a 6.20 chat with Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy, Loren & Rose star Jacqueline Bisset has taken issue with Tom Hanks‘ view of currently appropriate vs. inappropriate casting, which I highlighted on 6.14.22.

Bisset: “I can’t take all this talk about sexual roles. Who’s a man and who’s a woman. I just don’t understand it. I [actually] haven’t thought about it but I think it’s probably not a good idea. I think it’s all getting crazy. That a director can only use the actors that are able to be the person. Where does acting come in? Acting is a job about [xdelivering] the different emotions that you can do. ]But now] you have to be Mexican to play a Mexican part? You have to be Italian to play an Italian part. I just don’t know where that takes us to.

“It’s not a political statement when you begin casting. You try to find the right person for the job. I just don’t see it. I mean, I see a degree of it but I think parts should be open to many different groups of people. And I’m all for casting being fair. But to say, ‘You can’t make this movie with someone, you have to make it with someone else’ because of a rule. I think that’s turning a lot of people off.”

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.”

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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.

I’ve always trusted the idea that the experience of death, deep down, is more of a warm thing than a cold one. Perhaps even something blissful. And sappy as it may seem, right now I’m imagining that the famous dream sequence that concluded James Cameron‘s Titanic (’97) may be happening in the heads of the five wealthy victims on the Titan submersible as they face their eternal moment.

This finale (which I first saw inside the big Paramount lot theatre in November of ’97, almost 26 years ago) has always struck me as soothing, and right now (go ahead and call me a rank sentimentalist) there’s a part of me that’s hoping that the all-but-doomed victims of the Titan submersible are going through something similar…a journey of acceptance and release as their encounter with eternity settles into the marrow of their bones.