Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.
…if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor & founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house…basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear…except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.
If you wanted to self-delude you could tell yourself that this flash-and-dance number from Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman is mostly uncut — a single dazzling shot. It certainly seems that way from the 1:10 mark (once Taron Egerton appears from an opening in the fence) until he retreats into the pub and joins his bandmates around the 3:40 mark. 150 seconds!
It’s more likely three or four shots seamlessly blended together, but at least an energetic effort was made to persuade otherwise.
Any way you slice it this is easily the best sequence in the entire film.
While living in the bucolic bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, my father led a “Citizens for Kennedy” campaign — basically an appeal to independents and Republicans who had doubts about Richard Milhous Nixon‘s sweaty upper lip.
As it turned out Nixon won Union County (to which Westfield belonged) but JFK won New Jersey, albeit by a nosehair — 49.96% (1,385,415 votes) vs. 49.16% (1,363,324).
I kept the original bumper sticker and eventually duplicated it (peel-off sticker surface and all) at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. It was on the rear bumper of my black Nissan 240SX (which I bought in ’93) for many years, and it’s now pasted on the left side of the rumblehog.
I’ve said time and again that my current mode of liberalism is JFK-styled — i.e., sensible left moderate. If the former Massachusetts senator had the heaven-bequeathed ability to survey the cultural-political state of the USA in 2022, he’d be fuming over what the wokesters have done to the Democratic party brand.
The general image quality is obviously far superior in the 1.75:1 Criterion Bluray image, but consider the additional amount of shiny floor, not to mention the reflections within same, at the bottom of the 1.37:1 MPI Home Video image. I own Criterion’s A Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but chopping off the tops and bottoms of perfectly good visual content (otherwise known as “cleavering”) is a terrible practice among home-video distributors.
