Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups

What I've Been Into...

EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026). "Epic" isn't an overstatement. This is among the best concert films I've ever seen — maybe #2 after Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense." And it flips the script on Presley's Vegas years, which traditionally are framed as the long, drawn-out death of his career.

What we see here is a unparalleled live entertainer thrilled to take the stage after too many years spent making too many crap films. We see his addressing the press, his excitement about his return palpable and see him rehearsing with a crack band that includes the fantastic James Burton and his Telecaster. Rock, country, pop, these guys can play it, and Elvis can sing it, all.

The rehearsal scenes reminded me of watching the Beatles in Peter Jackson's "Get Back." Not only are they, like this film's concert footage, presented in vivid clarity, but they provide a fly-on-the-wall perspective of what this guy was really like: Focused, funny and talented as hell.

And then there are the scenes on stage. Like nothing else I've seen, this film conveys Presley's incredible charisma. The stage and the audience is his as he flirts, jokes and sings. The version of "Little Sister," which interpolates bits of the Fabs' "Get Back," is one of the coolest things I've ever hear/scene.

We also see him backstage, wearing that black leather suit, visiting with luminaries such as Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr., and treating them as peers or, maybe even, as his subjects. Elvis is/was King.

Sunday Reads:

Via 13th Dimension, Scott Tipton guides us through the weird early years of Wonder Woman:

When Mayer and Marston met to discuss first the advisory position, and then Marston creating a new female hero character for All-American, Mayer might not have known just how dedicated Marston was to the concept of the equality and supremacy of women. In the 1930s, Marston, a well-known psychologist of the time, as well as a creator of the polygraph lie-detector test, had predicted that “the next one hundred years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy – a nation of Amazons in the psychological rather than physical sense. Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love than man has. Today, realizing their love motive has no sustained force, nothing to feed on, women are diverting their energies into other channels. And as they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the nation.”