Skip to main content

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie

By

Check this out!  Someone actually has the audacity to make a movie of Atlas Shrugged.  I guess you might call it a Libertarians' revenge movie.  It is a well-plotted book and should be relatively easy to make into a movie, but what does one do with all those speeches by John Galt that went on for pages and pages?  It is as tough as trying to read Ron Paul.

Comments

  1. James FergusonMarch 16, 2011 at 11:09 AM

    Maybe Ron Paul is John Galt?

    ReplyDelete
  2. avrdsMarch 16, 2011 at 3:12 PM

    Avrds shrugged.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsMarch 16, 2011 at 3:14 PM

    [looks like there's some sort of bug here from fkp.nl -- netherlands? -- looking for people's passwords]

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonMarch 16, 2011 at 3:31 PM

    Looks like I hit a fake trailer first time around,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w151-e_Y_XE

    Pretty funny actually with all those actors staring meaningfully off into space. Have since posted the real trailer.

    Thanks for the alert, av.

    ReplyDelete
  5. James FergusonMarch 16, 2011 at 3:41 PM

    Found this one in the archives of the Colbert Nation, "Rand Illusion,"

    http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/221335/march-11-2009/the-word---rand-illusion

    ReplyDelete
  6. avrdsMarch 16, 2011 at 4:26 PM

    I just watched the previews -- hard to tell the real one from the parody. And just think ... it's only Part I!

    ReplyDelete
  7. James FergusonMarch 16, 2011 at 7:49 PM

    Interesting thing about the movie is that it is a relatively low budget affair ($15 mil) with no major actors. The director is relatively young and has worked mostly in television. Seems this is a film most of Hollywood backed away from, for obvious reasons, but who knows it may hit a nerve with all this new found interest in Libertarianism.

    The Colbert clip is pretty damn funny. It's from two years ago when it seemed Ayn Rand had become a buzz word.

    ReplyDelete
  8. avrdsMarch 16, 2011 at 8:38 PM

    Colbert has it down. I have never read Ayn Rand, but I can still get the jokes! He is very funny.

    Plus, the clips from fox news on the Obama "war on success" are hilarious. Only they were serious .....

    ReplyDelete
  9. TripplerMarch 16, 2011 at 9:22 PM

    Ayn Rand = ''leech'' according to her own standards. Typical right wing hypocrisy of the worse kind.

    ReplyDelete
  10. James FergusonMarch 17, 2011 at 8:53 AM

    I did read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. Had to read Fountainhead for a Building Arts class in college. Read AS out of curiosity. First half wasn't too bad, just as a story, but the second half was insufferable as she spelled out her philosophy through a series of John Galt speeches, each of which was 30 pages or so. Arghhhh! Good reason to quit after the first part. Fountainhead was a much better book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more