…if a semblance of AllInTheFamily 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!
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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’sAHardDay’sNightBluray, but chopping off the tops and bottoms of perfectly good visual content (otherwise known as “cleavering”) is a terrible practice among home-video distributors.
Who would dispute that boomers have been the worst generation ever? The greediest, most wasteful, most indulged, most sociopathic. They’ve made life economically arduous for Millennials, and almost futile if you look at things from an environmental perspective.
“Just this whole process of going through the baby boom’s history, I began to realize what a nicer society — kinder, more decent society — that we live in today than the society when I was a kid. I don’t think my ten-year-old boy has ever been in a fist fight. I mean there might be a little scuffling but I don’t think he’s has ever had that kind of violent confrontation that was simply part of the package when I was a kid.”
In my twelve years of primary education I got into one (1) schoolyard fist fight. It happened in seventh grade on a sunny spring day (or was it early fall?), on the edge of a baseball diamond. The other kid started it, but I fucking finished it.
It was over in less than a minute. Okay, 90 seconds. I took a few blows, but I kept punching and punching and actually knocked the guy down. The downside is that my hands were pretty swollen from all the hitting, and I think I may have gone to the family doctor to get my hands or wrists taped up.
I once came upon a pair of eight- or nine-year-olds beating up Jett. It was near the end of a school day, during some kind of outdoor recess. He was crying and crouching against a concrete wall, and his two attackers were standing over him. I stopped it, of course, and went over to the teachers who were presiding and explained what had happened. They in turn told the mothers of the two attackers, and subsequently those mothers really read the riot act to their boys.
HE to God #1: “Cosmic design, unity and connectivity are obvious to anyone with half a brain, but as a beyond-intelligent entity do you and your only begotten son feel just a teeny bit responsible for the massive amounts of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance that are directly attributable to religious devotion? Which is partly responsible for destroying the earth as we speak? Are you good with all that?”
Roughly 25 years ago I was hosting a Woodland Hills screening series called Hot Shot Movies, and one of the films I booked for the fall of ’97 was TaylorHackford‘s The Devil’s Advocate. It’s no one’s idea of a great film. It has, however, a great Al Pacino speech at the very end — the Devil himself (i.e., “John Milton”) explaining what a pious asshole and sadistic mind-fucker God the Father is.
I don’t know who wrote Pacino’s rant, but the film is based on Andrew Neiderman‘s same-titled 1990 novel; the screenplay was co-authored by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy.
Milton: “Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does he do? I swear…for his own amusement…hisownprivatecosmicgagreel, he sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time, [and] he’s laughin’ his sick fuckin’ ass off! He’s a tight-ass, he’s a sadist, he’s an absenteelandlord.”
HE to God #2: “Do you agree or disagree with Gilroy‘s assertion that you’re an absentee landlord? When I was a kid I thought you were that deep, slowed-down voice in Cecil B. Demille‘s The Ten Commandments; now you’re nothing more than a component in one of the ugliest political-religious movements in U.S. history.”
George C. Scott: "What do you mean 'if I love you'? I raped you in a suicidal rage. How do we get love and children all of a sudden?" Diana Rigg: "For heaven's sake, Herb...I ought to know if a man loves me or not. You must have told me a hundred times last night that you love me. You murmured it, shouted it. One time you opened a window and bellowed it out into the street." Scott: "Well, I think those were more expressions of gratitude than love." Rigg: "Gratitude for what?" Scott: "Well...my God, for resurrecting feelings of life in me that I thought dead!" Rigg: "Oh, my God...what do you think love is?" Scott: "All right, I love you! You love me! I'm not about to argue with so relentless a romantic."
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