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Atlas Shrugged! The Movie! opened yesterday. I considered seeing it, because I am a scientist, and certain phenomena ought to be studied. (Some people make a nice living investigating ringworms, you know.) And also I figured it just might be good for a laugh.
Unfortunately (or else, not) it isn’t playing anywhere within 200 miles of me. I live in Rural Heartland America, in the sense that I can see cows from my window. I’d have to drive about three hours to see the piece of crap, sit down and watch it, and then drive three hours back, which would take me, about… let’s see… (rapidly calculates, including running time of film, actual as well as perceived)… nine years. And while I would drive anywhere for yuks, I won’t do that.
For, as my dear friend Fez-Boy has informed us, the reviews of this Supertrain! Wreck! concur that it’s silly, boring, and awful. But there’s a nice little insight into the “mind” (for want of a better term) of the sort of person, oh pardon I mean Heroic Individual, who totally digs the Randian vibe at Rotten Tomatoes. The critics panned it with a dreadful 5%, but 85% of the Audience Reactions are positive. This Audience Reaction is typical:
Ignore reviews, including mine. Rand’s philosophy has many enemies and they will all bash this movie, even if it was the next Gone With the Wind (which it was not, but was definitely worth seeing).
Which is all sorts of revealing. Gone with the Wind of course is a great American film because it tells a great American fairytale. As a film, GwtW is of course fantastically entertaining. As a reflection of reality, it is nasty and pernicious.
I agree with Roy that Atlas Shrugged certainly could have been made into a watchable film. Its source material is asinine, but then so is the source material for most epics, verse or cinematic. That a story is asinine is no object to it being, well, fun.
But I doubt that a true believer in the Randian ideal could ever have made a version of Atlas Shrugs that wasn’t horrendous. To do so would after all require the ability to step outside the insular world that is the Randian ideal, and accept that, well, there are other realities.
Which is a trivial point. More seriously, idiots like, say, Paul Ryan, believe the fairytale, and are desperately trying to make it true.
Ever get the sense you’re living in a crap movie? You are.
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saTHERSday nite live!
I am a scientist too but in this case, I think I’ll let my peers study Randian behavior.
On a brighter note, I’m now an official, card carrying member of the professional left. WooHoo!
Thersaturday Night Fever!
…Like, for example, sane people.
SaTHERSday Night Fever!
Atlas shat all over his drawers and everything else and now trying to shit on all of us. There is absolutely nothing to redeem self centered, greedy, sociopathy,
And reality.
Evening.
And to what do we owe this honor that we may be enlightened (unlike watching Atlas Mugged).
Watching “the market” for the true test of how great a movie it is.
Then will inspect (also a background in science even though I caved in to much easier economics) results to respond to every troll’s comment. Really hoping that Atlas will be the miracle trollicide we are all researching.
I don’t know, Thers, but I think you got off lucky here. I am not sure that even your famous patented force 10 wingnut hazmat suit could protect you from the brain damage entailed in watching this horror.
Are Kochroaches giving out free tickets? Should I be alert to ‘market manipulation.’
i don’t think there is any brain bleach strong enough to help after seeing that movie…
I am pretty sure that they could find a significant number of homeless people who would go for it, especially if they threw in a large bag a popcorn
“Atlas Shrugged” and “Gone With the Wind” are both about extremely self-involved people who, unfortunately to the people in their wakes, are very competent in achieving their desired goals. At the detriment to others. At least Scarlett got her comeuppance at the end.
Atlas Thugged.
I got my FDL card in the mail today of course.
I read the book at 14 (and hated it) and am still recovering from the psychic damage 45 years later.
There is also a website for matchmaking for Ayn Rand fans. Not sure google got me to the right spot so won’t link. Also notice that brain bleach supply being drawn down too fast to allow another Ayn Rand link.
Just got back from seeing it (65 minute drive, in my case). I’m reading the novel now, and almost finished.
I gave the movie a 5 on imdb. It didn’t suck, but just barely. The James Taggart character was my biggest disappointment, but the Dagney and Lillian Rearden characters were quite good.
Too much was left out. Francisco’s d’Antonio’s role got butchered, and they completely excised the flashback sequence which detailed his romance with Dagney. Jim Taggert’s romance with Cheryl is also cut out, as is the Starnesville section and most of the Dr. Stadler sequence.
Get a new writer for parts 2 and 3, and a new actor for James Taggert, and perhaps they can redeem themselves.
Aha!
Meh. It just sounds dull and cultish.
Screen ‘em with The Great Gatsby and ypoiu have a really spiffy self-involvement triple feature.
Nobody big is mass distributing this film? I thought real america where the cows are as Thers puts it was the GOP target audience? If not there the burbs?
We need a map of where its being shown just where does the GOP and the movie industry think the fans of this film are concentrated? The film industry I assume has polling data but who watches what films as good or better than the Dems or GOP has.
So did Ayn. Cigarettes killed her but not before she applied for and received social security in her husband’s name. I’m sure she never paid in a dime personally.
EDIT: I’m aware that Ayn is the author, not the character.
Given the source material, it is totally irredeemable.
It’s hard to mate solipsists.
Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
In other words, totally true to the book (at least if it has turgid prose, underdeveloped, unsympathetic, and unbelievable characters, and glacial plot pacing).
Free or cheap showings at GOP colleges to boost ticket sales? I saw Mel Gibson’s Hamlet in college cheap at the student center.
I read the book at about 15 or 16. I have always pictured Dagney as being played by Joan Crawford – complete with flaring nostrils.
Not to mention sociopaths. I’ll be Dahmer’s old address still gets matchmaking mail.
Be careful what you wish for there DrDick. Those homeless might take the Objectivism message to heart and in a fit of rage go off and form their own colony of homeless people, and then where would the rest of society be? hmm?
A film about Ayn’s writing the book and being inspired by a serial killer would be great plus any GOPer says they love Ayn we point out all Ayn’s free market hero’s are patterned after that serial killer.
A damned sight worse off than if all those elite “producers” went Galt.
It was one of the few books that I found so mind numbing that I immediately threw it away after reading it. I’ve only done that two other times and I can’t remember either of those other titles offhand.
Just got back from seeing it (65 minute drive, in my case). I’m reading the novel now, and almost finished.
I gave the movie a 5 on imdb. It didn’t suck, but just barely. The James Taggart character was my biggest disappointment
Kindly elucidate the reasons for your disappointment?
Ditto and that was as a 14 year old white male, which is its prime market.
It’s a hard slog to be sure. In those days I thought that if I bought a book I had to read it. I don’t do that now but I only actually have thrown a book across the room once.
I read one of Rand’s books at a like age.
For some reason, I really loved me some Joan Crawford. Was earlier than my teens, the only time in my life when I showed any interest in pop culture. Must have been the movie mags in the beauty shop where my mom sent me for perms. I was impressed by Crawford’s jet black eyebrows, and asymmetric mouth.
Yeppers. All that ticket stuffing stuff.
I was in the Navy when I read it. Somebody who was transferring out was cleaning out his locker in the Airframes shop and I was inheriting it and he left the book behind. I had never heard of Ayn Rand. After reading, my reaction was no wonder I’d never heard of her. I thought it was going to be science fictiony but it turned out to be….well, lame.
Funny aside to that story: There was so much fighting about those double wide lockers in the airframes shop that right after I inherited that one, they started getting rid of them and replacing them with units of four small lockers. I had the last double wide locker when I left. They never even attempted to take my locker away but I had a whole lotta people kissing my butt when I cleaned it out. EVERYBODY in that shop wanted it.
I have thrown a few, but mostly supposed “scholarly” works.
Now I find all this Ayn Rand bashing politically incorrect.
In the marketplace of ideas, Rand has an important role to play.
I exhort all of you to respect the marketplace of ideas and not to close your minds to any ideas.
/s
Nietzsche’s Sister tried going Gault set up a racially pure colony and everything last i heard they were dirt poor farmers and inbreeding had well some members of the colony they don’t let outsiders see because its that bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Förster-Nietzsche
http://www.strandbooks.com/latin-american/forgotten-fatherland-the-true-story-of-nietzsches-sister-and-her-lost-aryan-colony
Meghan McCain and the GOP wants to go Gault well considering their genetics, talents and education I’m not sure a colony of them would survive long enough to have to worry about inbreeding.
I pray constantly that they will all go Galt and soon.
They wanted your double wide locker, not your butt nor your copy of Rand. Just wanted to make sure I unnerstood your colleagues’ priorities.
I thought her market niche in the market place for ideas was to provide writers with comedy writers block a cure:)
Correct on all, though some of them may have wanted my butt, nobody ever said so. And they couldn’t have my copy of Atlas Shrugged because it went straight into the trash. I offered it to Terry but was declined so I threw it directly into the dumpster behind my apartment.
I would still like to see the actual experimental results of such a colony.
Among academics, it is all about filing cabinets, book shelves, and offices with windows.
Waiting for TDS and CR’s take on the movie.
“The reason why academic fights are so fierce is bc there’s so little to fight about.”
Can’t remember where I first heard that cliche.
Perhaps so; but as far as I’m concerned, they can still go fuck themselves.
I’ve thrown one and it was the only book I ever picked up to read but never finished. I wish I could remember the name but it sounded really good on the coverleaf but I was only 71 pages from the end and it still hadn’t gotten into any actual action. It was like an endless Stephen King setup without the payoff. I did throw that one. Directly into the fireplace.
Same kinds thing in a way. The locker was your personal, inviolable space and I liked to keep my enormous, gigantic locker mostly empty, just as a poke to everybody else who had teeny lockers. Yeah, I entertain myself that way at times. People all around me trying to cram all of their shit in while I could have very easily taken a nap inside mine. Just mean! >:-D
Me too! Hurrah!
Its been generations the second link is to a book detailing the author’s visit however its been generations they refuse to even show their worse kids much less be studied so I assume it pretty bad.
But I would love to see the results too:)
I’m going to call it an early night. Peace out, y’all!
Sleep well!
g’nite edp
*heh* And here I thought Tbogg’s takedown was brilliant…
Yeah, I’d Taggart That
Silly me…!
Aloha, Thers…! You couldn’t pay me enough to want to watch that drivel…! ;-)
I’ve often thought about writing an Agatha Christie type thriller in a college-type setting where the motive turns out to be 6 inches of new carpeting, but I’m not sure the joke would be clear.
Night EDP
Its quite obvious that is one of their problems and that their insistence on conformity in intellectual matters and belief over facts results in group think a kind of mental inbreeding.
All those rich folk tracing their arrival on the Mayflower the 13 colonies etc well I’m sure they have problems Bush certainly is a great example of that.
I’m calling it a night to. Gotta get up early tomorrow. Oya.
Agreed:)
g’nite margaret
Heh!
Great article on Rand by Matt Taibbi:
http://tinyurl.com/2f6l3xh
Night! Sleep well.
A study of how long a rich or ruling family can keep power in America would be a great read. How they lose their cash would be more interesting.
OK, to bed. Niters all.
Bush’s problems aren’t due to the Mayflower (he has three couples from it, once each, so not inbred there). It’s due to him being a sociopath with parents who didn’t get him help when he was young enough that it might have worked.
Night!
I think when wealth is made from wealth banking stocks etc rather than actual business then is when empire’s fall.
Roman grain ship speculators, Dutch Tulip mania, Spain’s treasure ship economy etc.
I doubt that they saw it as a problem.
Pleasant dreams, Thers and Sleepy Heads…! ;-)
g’nite thers
Sounds like Alcott’s ‘Fruitlands’. That project lasted seven months. (IT was a commune, really.)
Ah but if he had been born poor he would be in prison Bush was to rich to fail. As far as being a sociopath I thought CEO’s corporate board rooms and prisons were the place to find sociopaths?
The rich elite seem to by the society and business pressure be breeding for these traits.
Think I will join the rush and toddle off as well. Take care all.
Just checked amazon.com. “Atlas Shrugged” is No.4 on the best seller list. Hmm… Maybe someone needs to do a movie with progressive themes. Any ideas here? (maybe “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein?) Are there any progressive novels?
Probably not, but at that time it wasn’t something that was done, either. (Going to a shrink, or taking your kid to one, that is.)
g’nite dr dick
In my view, James Taggert is supposed to be a quasi-grotesque, in the Wesley Mouch mold. In this production, he comes off as a Chippendale stripper who lost his way on the way to some hotel bar. Madsen doesn’t convey any of the moral conflict or pure villainy of the novel’s portrayal; epic FAIL all the way.
Part of the blame is due to the lackluster screenplay, of course. Visually, I think Atlas Shrugged would have worked much better as a graphic novel in the Watchmen mold, especially since Rand’s villains are almost like out of an old Batman comic. Wesley Mouch even looks a little like the Penguin in the film.
Hey Suzanne!
Everyone home and happy?
hey ce — yup — i’m going back tomorrow for another dose of new baby smell
The colony and several royal families are our best chance to study inbreeding. The Colony is the only multi generation attempt to go Gault there ever was.
The GOPers love theory but not experimental results. Economics, War, Education, etc they call themselves conservative but they are not really conservative.
Oh, make me weep. I totally forgot about new baby smell!
I heard it as “The infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low.” Mom’s 3rd was an academic, and I first heard it during that marriage. They divorced when I was 11, though, and I wasn’t paying attention to things like attributions. Just remembering sharp little comments like that one.
When my little family visited my sister-in-law years ago, she was shocked to find that I had not exposed my girls to Gone With The Wind. So, she sat them down in front of her telly and played the movie for them. The kids were 7 and 10. At first they thought is was funny and, then, were horrified at how creepy it was.
My sister-in-law is Randian. She has her doctorate in experimental psychology and tortures small animals for a living.
Confessions of an economic hitman? Collapse Jared diamond? Or you mean fiction novels with a story that could be turned into a movie easy?
Two sentences that sum up an entire ideology better than books written about the subject.
WELL DONE MARY!
Oh, the stories I could tell.
Seconded!
Fictional stories, of course, but with progressive memes. For the most part, people don’t want to go to the movies to watch a documentary (with obvious exceptions, but in general documentaries aren’t popular).
Sib of spouse, or spouse of sib? Either way, my horrified sympathies to whoever had to grow up with her. And deep suspicions about whoever chose to marry her. Oh, dear.
Well, ordinarily I’d say “then DO tell!”, most especially considering, what I consider, your gift at telling such stories.
However, considering in this case it’s family, I won’t ask.
A year and a half ago, a poster on Daily Kos posted a hilarious diary titled “Atlas Chugged: The Ayn Rand Drinking Game (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/09/807430/-Atlas-Chugged:-The-Ayn-Rand-Drinking-Game).
Play responsibly.
Haven’t seen anyone in that family since the day of my first husband’s funeral. There was only a brother and sister left at that time. The brother was a doc but lost his license due to drug abuse. And the sister was a speed and sex addict. They come from a southern family abused by their sense of self importance and so very non-functional it is beyond understanding. Since my name has no relationship to them I do not worry much about telling tales. But you would think that they would call to see how their nieces are doing. They are small people with big brains. Their brother was the good one.
Paul Ryan is Ayn Rand’s Revenge.
[Warning: Scary morph!]
What is really insulting about the libertarians is the delusion that they are such great innovators. The social democracies have been much more keen on high speed rail, and the typical randroid bitches about having to replace 120 year old incandescent light-bulbs with florescents, and invokes rand to justify it. I am constantly amazed at the how far the Chinese and the Europeans are ahead on the technological innovation front. Most libertarians are global warming deniers too.
Also the countries railroads were built with tuns of corporate welfare and landgrants. The idea of building something form nothing is not historically in evidence.
Good Evening All,
Remember, Atlas shrugged, but Yertle burped. Rand gives me a headache.
Just wanted to stop by and happily tell yall that my cardio-feedback experiments have advanced significantly. I posted a diary the other day, and hope you’ll have a look.
When Kissinger was at State, it was always about proximity and exclusive access to the then essential photocopier. He was a living expression, but not the originator, of the faculty club put down that academic politics were so fierce because the stakes were so low.
I heard of a guy so dedicated to the privacy of his locker at Ft. Bragg, that he rigged the handle with a little 4-C [sic]. Naturally, his mates, as I understand it, spun it round, took off the back and emptied it, but left the handle rigging. He got the message.
It’s all about proportion. A better story than Atlas would be how Rand lost hers after escaping from post-revolutionary Russia, and took her disappointment at the loss of privilege out on everyone she met afterwards.
True. The money just didn’t materialise out of nowhere. It was a combo of private and public money.
Now watch the Randians’ heads explode.
The Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels may be a crass commercial idea from the get go, but compare the board’s list to the readers:
Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels
In the reader’s top 10, 4 Ayn Rands and 3 L.Ron Hubbards.
Depressing.
Ayn Rand on Native Americans:
“They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . .What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.“
So let me see if I understood your post. You DIDN’T see the movie. You wrote that it sucked in your title and you are basically repeating what other reviewers said and your point is what? That you don’t want to see the movie?
You’re a scientist really? You seem to have a biased premise to begin with.
I posted a comment here, was #108, but it’s gone now. Anyone, like a moderator, know what happened to it?
Ayn Rand, racist and red in tooth and paw. I wish Jack London had been alive to review her work.
I think Rand would have agreed with the description that Andrew Jackson stole them Indian lands fair and square. He devoted his whole life and presidency to it. The inconsistency would not have given her pause.
I especially like the part of the quote that the Indians deserve to lose their entire civilization because they do not share the white European’s characterization of “property” as having divine status among men. Freud would have spent years with her on his couch, and himself needed therapy afterwards.
Alan Greenspan – Rand devotee
Paul Ryan – Rand devotee
‘Nuff said.
Typically for the right’s heroes, it’s best not to inquire into them too closely. From Nan Talese’s review of Anne Heller’s, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (emphasis added):
And this describes Atlas Shrugged:
Rand spends thousands of pages pouring out her anger and loathing at a world that failed to appreciate her, despite her access to bankers and princes, her fame and wealth. She is devoid of compassion, empathy, understanding, or contemplation of any need or interest but her own. She glories in that ignorance and overweening self-regard. Hers are not views on which society could be built; they would lead to its destruction.
Correction: Those quotes are from a review written by Alexander Nazaryan.
Howard Zinn modeled a life and view of society very different from Rand’s land of the elite, by the elite and for the elite (as long as Ayn Rand was deemed, in Orwell’s phrase, more equal than others):
One reason Rand’s work continues to be so “popular” is relentless, uncritical self-promotion:
And to keep the Institute’s revenue, popularity, and relevance alive as well. As long as there are predators among us, and there have been since we came down from the trees, Rand’s work will never go unread.
This is Rand’s glorification of herself and her disdain for the rest of her species:
With that self-description, a GP, therapist, priest, rabbi, imam, lawyer, judge, teacher, college admissions counselor, community organizer or neighborhood parent, would reach for the commitment papers and tell their dogs and children never ever to play in her yard.
Gore Vidal’s 1961 critique could have been written yesterday:
See above.
I think I understand what she means by the first sentence. I don’t agree with the rest of that paragraph. By “we” I think she means collectivism, the use of force to make a group of people do what some other group of people want. That’s slavery or as she or others call it serfdom. Many liberals call it corruption, fuedalism…
Did you see the movie or are you going to see it? Did you read the book?
Well, for a Sunday morning pick-me-up, here’s Doonesbury’s rip of one of the archetype Randians:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/doonesbury
Rip, Gary, RIP! :o)
Ayn Rand’s material can be made into a good film. Gary Cooper in Fountainhead was a great movie. They did take some license with the material, but they did a great job of showing the rugged individual that stands up for his ideas and labor and the parasitic corporate mindset that globs on to those efforts to conform them. Raymond Massey played what Rupert Murdoch wished he was. If it is entertaining and a poorly done movie blame the writers and director. Cooper and Neal proved that her work can create great cinema.
I knew it!
I recommend in stark contrast “Atlas and the Fat Man”, an extraordinary essay by Thomas Merton, found in his The Behavior of Titans.
imdb just put up my review if anyone is interested.
For those of you who are curious about Atlas Shrugged but don’t want to actually plough through it (so as to write more original snarky commentary on threads such as these, presumably), I recommend Onkar Ghate’s essay “The Part and Chapter Headings of Atlas Shrugged“.
Robert Mayhew’s collection of Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a great read, and also includes an essay by Jeff Britting on adapting Atlas Shrugged to the screen, utilizing Rand’s notes and the beginning of her own adaptation which she was working on before she died in 1982.
Yes, I agree; Fountainhead was a solid film. It’s fascinating to compare it with Atlas because Rand wrote the screenplay to Fountainhead, and it gives an indication of what Atlas could’ve been if the production hadn’t been so …er…streamlined (to be kind) and had received the benefit of a better screenplay. King Vidor was a great choice as a director; his silent films The Crowd and The Big Parade are two of my favorite American silent films, and frankly, I don’t think he gets enough credit as compared with Griffith and Chaplin. With respect to the casting, I think Patricia Neal was chosen specifically because she looks a little like Rand, especially in the eyes. Cooper was a little stiff as Roark, but his look is so right for the film, you don’t mind too much.
Rand’s vanity was one of her shortcomings, unfortunately. It’s probably the main reason her Objectivism, while certainly popular with Americans, sputtered out as a movement upon her death. She even went so far as to give herself a cameo in Atlas, playing a fishwife writer hanging out in Galt’s Gulch.
Latest FaBlog: On The Atchison, Topeka, & The Ayn Rand
I have always considered that such a subjective, self-centered world view being called Objectivism to be a disingenuous contradiction –only in a solipsism that allows no other reality, and then there would be no distinction to be made.
off topic but,
Ayn Rand/Ann Coulter, if I believed in reincarnation I would be tempted to think that Rand was refurbished as Coulter and spit back into the universe as punishment for mankind not outright rejecting the nonsense Rand propogated her first time through.
just thinking of similarities here…
they are both right wing nutjob hack propagandists, what Coulter may lack in infuluence she makes up for in volume with her prolific ignorant hate filled word salads in both print and media appearances
also, they both look, act, speak and write as if they consume staggering amounts of methamphetamines
In her religion of “I”, only Ms. Rand and her imaginary coterie of economic, intellectual, physical and sexual super beings are members. No one else was permitted to have an ego or to be worthy of survival. That would put her emotional maturity at about age two.
Ironically, in her youth she is said to have rejected Plato’s idealism – his perfect ideals that we can see only through the shadows they cast on the cave walls – in favor of Aristotle’s pragmatism.
Ms. Rand rejects the harsh reality that grinds the poor and now the middle class without relief. Wouldn’t we all? Like the emotional child she was, she does it through magic. She adopts the imaginary perfect. By definition, they would achieve perfection were they not held back by real people, deluded religionists, who subscribe either to the church of self-sacrifice or the temple of collectivism.
She was correct about the excesses of collectivism, but blindly ignored the equally crude excesses of unregulated capitalism. She was correct about the destruction of the vulnerable by the imperfections of the sometimes tortured, power hungry institutions of religion – “Give me your pocketbooks – or at least control of your vaginas!”.
Her solution, however, throws out the good they aspire to do through harnessing our inherent altruism. Like a medieval ascetic, she denigrates what it is to be human in order to reach nirvana. For her, that is not communion with God, but the acquisition of enough power to tell the world to fuck off.
Understanding that if god did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent her, she substitutes her own marred religion of the “I” and “me”, with herself as god.
Shorter Randian version:
I am THAT I am.
Ye shall have no strange gods before ME.