Atlas Shrugged Miniseries Will Bore The Motor Of The World

Yeah, the book was terrible and the philosophy is sophmoric. Am I a horrible person for still finding Francisco D'Anconia and Hank Reardon hot?

If anything, that's what sealed the deal for me that Rand was a terrible writer - why on earth is Dagny choosing boring, bland John Galt over those two?

Adah

Wasn't this supposed to be Brangelina's vehicle? Thus the bartering for their *cough-cough* Oscar nominations last year?

I met one of the early screenwriters on this project about 3 to 4 years ago at the Austin Film Festival. It seems like a meat grinder of a project, spitting out talented, capable people left and right. Another "Apocalypse Now" in the making?

@kathotdog: I would watch this movie.

eleusiswalks

@allyzay: This is the best, truest comment ever.

eleusiswalks

@CollierInsana: sweet Jesus, you are joking, right?

@atlasfugged: Engineer, not mere bricoleur, and your basic twat.

WretchedGnu

@Botswana Meat Commission FC: bs's unintentional homoeroticism makes it worth watching, and laughing at.

the_lerpa

@Pope John Peeps II:
Usually I'm all over interesting, well-executed action movies. My problem with B.S. had more to do with its philosophy. Just sort of a juvenile mess of bullshit...

@MissNormaDesmond: I'll print up some on Cafe Press. We'll split the profits.

atlasfugged

According to a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was second to the Bible as the book that made most difference in American readers' lives.

ValborgMelbo

I would rather be waterboarded 183 times than be forced to read this god-awful tome. Regardless of their philosophical predilections, those who claim Atlas Shrugged is great literature are insufferably pretentious wankers.

atlasfugged

@ShanghaiLil: ESTholes are still out there, only now they are Lifespringholes, or whatever the latest iteration is.

I dread an unholy alliance amongst Scientology, EST and its descendants, and Randroids. They will be unassailably convinced of their own rightness in all things, mildly intelligent but certain of their vast intellectual superiority and arcane knowledge of matters not comprehensible to lesser beings, tedious beyond belief, and incredibly gullible toward anyone or anything that tells them they are ultra-super-duper-special and destined for epic greatness.

@atlasfugged: I want a bumper sticker that says, "Who gives a shit who John Galt is?"

@Unsolicited Advice: Only if next up is a webisode of Meno featuring Sean Hannity as the slave boy.

@J. Frank Parnell: I was hoping Bobcat Goldthwait, so he could incomprehensibly scream, squeak and squeal Galt's 90 page soliloquy to the moochers. Him or a drunken Gary Busey. ::Sigh:: Oh well, who is John Galt ....

atlasfugged

Thanks for the Boondock Saints reference. I really don't get the appeal of that movie. I had an acquaintance who raved about it. I saw it, it sucked. This person is now barred from my life.

Mymoustache

@CollierInsana: What a load of horseshit. You do realize that the "bottom 99%" all think that they're in the top 1, right? Just like you.

In point of fact, one my draw the conclusion that the top 1% are pretty sure of their place and their abilities, so don't have to bolster their self-image by claiming to be top 1%.

@Pope John Peeps II: Indeed. Boondock Saints is a very entertaining movie and even has some good dialogue moments in it. But anybody who looks to it as a source of moral inspiration is out-of-whack.

The adulation it receives reminds me of all the Godfather and Scarface worship I see. Do you know what it is you just watched? Did it get through to you at all?

Aidan_

Anthony Lane, rather than directly review the film adaptation of Great expectations (starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow), reviewed the novelization of that film adaptation of the Dickens novel, which was of course very different from the Dickens novel. That's funny for the travesty it exposes, but think of the opportunity here for Rand.

Bulkington

One ingenious literary innovation of Rand's is that you know exactly how a character is going to turn out by the sound of his name, or by a description of his figure. As soon as pudgy little Bertram Scudder hits the scene, you can be certain he will eventually say something like, "You know, money is the root of all evil." At which point he gets totally ObjectivistPWND by Francisco's 18-page rebuttal. ("Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?" etc. etc.)

So obviously, we can be sure that once printed word is translated into moving image, the end result will be about as thrilling as watching an inventory of your own spice cabinet taking place.

redribbon

@Pope John Peeps II: Shouldn't it be "pound me"? We're talking rape fantasies, not S&M here -- that is, if I recall the half of the book I suffered through.

pmarble

My high school theater class did a production of the Rand play "The Night of January Sixteenth." It is a formulaic choose-your-own-adventure/ courtroom drama /murder mystery. I played a prostitute with a very short skirt because my theater teacher was a perv.

That is what I always remember when anyone tells me what a great writer Rand was.

@Baroness: "Pummel me like I'm advocating universal health care! YES! YES!"

Boondock Saints is all about faith, sacrifice, brotherhood, and good v. evil. At least it doesn't have pointless graphic sex scenes just to lure in viewers or some bimbo "hot" actress, I thought it was deep and had some clever ideas.

milominderbinder

Ugh. Note: if I were Ayn Rand it would have taken me 762 pages to make that point.

SanjushreeWopster

@Baroness: God will get you for that, Walter!

ShanghaiLil

@City_Dater: Has anyone else started meeting ESTholes again? Or is it just me?

ShanghaiLil

@lacieca01: I particularly like the moment when an almost catatonic Pat Neal drops a statue from the window of her apartment because "It was beautiful!" And of course, her sex scene with Gary Cooper is the hottest example of right-wing sex I've ever seen. Probably because no one involved lived on C Street.

ShanghaiLil

@minou: It's not. It's just an action movie. But it's an original action movie, with some freshness and humour, and it's well-executed.

Rent it some weekend. It's not bad. But it's only amazing to boys still impressed with fake ways of feeling manly.

@Botswana Meat Commission FC: Almost without fail, across all borders of gender, class, race, time, space, etc etc, my college comp students love this "Boondock Saints." They have tried to convince me to watch it, but I resist. Still all this adulation leaves me in a mild state of WTF. How is this film the "We are the World" of college freshmen?

@allyzay:
Better to find out at a distance. Ever actually meet someone adorable and then they start spewing libertarian "self-actualized" nonsense at you? Creepy. Like finding out your high school crush is now a Scientologist.
Which I guess happened to people who worshipped Tom Cruise in the '80s...

City_Dater

@yetimike: You're ex, eh? You often go around promoting your ex's website?

I doubt it.

Why am I responding to this?

I had never seen "Boondock Saints", but my wife, who teaches college lit/writing kept telling me how much all her students loved that shit.

I should have known it would automatically suck when she told me college kids liked it.

As long as Joe Eszterhas is brought in for script treatment, this will be golden.

bittergreen

@Chris H: Sweet, buddy.

@CollierInsana: If Ayn Rand were here, she'd be a 104-year-old chain-smoking, insanely selfish misanthrope. Which is not as cool as it sounds. Oh, and she'd still be a fucking horrible writer.

Am I the only person on the planet who hasn't read Ayn Rand? I can't think of anything that sounds less interesting to read.

Well, except the violent sex part.

@allyzay: I read both of them only because they were notable and I wanted to understand just how effed up Rand was.

We're developing an Ayn Rand Deprogrammer at Denialism Blog: http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/01/the_ayn_rand_deprogrammer_subm.php

Also, Paul Pickrel of Harper's wrote a divine review of Atlas when it was released: "...It makes life wonderfully simple, and in a way that is agreeable to many of us, probably to all of us at some moment in our lives: according to its argument there is no contradiction or strain between man's inner life and his social role, for unrestrained egoism solves all problems. In addition, Miss Rand is able to enlist some of the more disreputable human emotions--hatred, contempt, anger--in a pretty powerful way. Oddly enough, though I do not believe in her characters for a moment, I do believe in their wrath."

I'm up for this, and a sitcom based on Plato's Republic starring Bill O'Reilly as Thrasymachus and Fox News as the cave.

@atlasfugged: Probably Dean Cain.

J. Frank Parnell

Let's take the unreadable, and make it unwatchable. Great. Idea.

J. Frank Parnell

Who *isn't* John Galt?

GORDONGARTRELLE

@allyzay: Was my Thursday afternoon G-line ride last week...

James V Silva

Trivia: John Galt Corporation was implicated in the fire at the Deutsche Bank downtown that resulted in the deaths of firefighters. Life imitating art imitating delusional world view of Ayn Rand?

"Public and private records give no indication of how many employees it has, what its volume of business is or who its clients are. There are almost no accounts of any projects it has undertaken on any scale, apart from 130 Liberty Street. Court records are largely silent. Some leading construction executives in the city say they have never even heard of it."

You can't make this stuff up. Well, you can, and it's just as liable as the real thing to end up as a miniseries on Lifetime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/nyregion/23company.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Ayn Rand is much-needed intellectual nutrition for a nation that still doesn't understand that A = A.

WretchedGnu

@allyzay: Probably the most relevant thing ever said pertaining to my current life-experience.

Julio Esquivel

@Baroness:
But the jack-hammering!

Please, please, please let Neil Peart be involved!

Angelina Jolie had been attached to the film at one time. Apparently she came to her senses.

I've had the misfortune of reading the book. Worst 18 months of my life.

Well, there goes my plan to marry Charlize Theron.

onebadclam

How about Charlize Theron as Dabney Coleman as Francine M. Hart Jr. in a reversed role remake of 9 to 5. The three male secretaries will be played by Ryan Reynolds, Paul Rudd and Jason Seigel. I

Who the fuck is John Galt?!

atlasfugged

Never have "sex" and "climactic" been so dissatisfyingly placed in the same paragraph.

kneetoe

Boy, they picked a damn fine type to film a hymn to ultracapitalism, no?

Maybe they should make it a comedy?

After that, I'd like to see a movie with Nick Nolte as an extremely mellow motorcycle repairman. And Clint Eastwood as a guy who shot a man in Algeria just to watch him die. And Kate Hudson with Owen and Luke Wilson in the horror comedy Hell Is Other People. And Nathan Lane as a Greek guy who likes to ask young men lots of questions in Mamma Mia! 2: Plato's Retreat.

@Baroness: Gah! Going to my happy place, going to my happy place. Must. not. think. about. this!

pmarble

Unmatchable. (Or is that "unwatchable"?)

@allyzay: Yeah, but if they're still in college, I'd be willing to geve em a break. We all experiment with foolish things in college.

pmarble

The worst thing in the world is when you're on the subway and you see a hot person and you are like :D and then you see they are reading "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" and you are like :(

@pmarble: I shudder to think of what Randian role-playing scenes he and Andrea Mitchell have gotten up to during their sexytime.

Now I must go bleach my brain-pan.

Sheesh, I would rather watch Shia in Wall St II, and I do not say that lightly.

'The Fountainhead' film is soooooo weird/ bad -- here, my ex wrote about it far better than I could: http://petitesophist.blogspot.com/2009/01/head.html

yetimike

Oh the irony of trying to film this awful book just when all of its underlying tenets have been pretty conclusively shown to be hogwash.

Will Alan Greenspan get a cameo?

pmarble

@atlasfugged: Okay, seriously? We should make t-shirts, too. I would totally buy one.

@MissNormaDesmond: You go girl! Well-behaved women never changed the world!

ShanghaiLil

@ShanghaiLil: An acquaintance of mine (I'd considered her a friend previously, but revised the opinion) once deliberately deceived me in an attempt to shill me into the clutches of Lifespring. The idea was to get me in there under false pretenses, and then I would be held captive with the other suckers by peer pressure and the fear of making a scene.

Yeah, they picked the wrong girl that time.

@MissNormaDesmond: Yes, I was dating a fellow who sang the praises of something called LifeForce. Naturally suspicious of anything that sponsors "seminars," I turned to the interwebs for advice, at which point I realized I was dating an ESThole. Then, while watching CASABLANCA, he asked me which came first, the Civil War or WWII. That was the moment I really decided that sex was not enough to sustain a relationship. Not for very long, anyway.

ShanghaiLil

@Baroness: I hearted you for this. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I got about 1/10th of the way through Atlas Shrugged (for an ethics course! Assigned without irony!) and just gave up. Not because I found her view abominable, which I did, but just because it was an unreadable brick.

Very clear that English was a second language for her.

Aidan_

@eleusiswalks: I'd watch it before I'd watch Atlas Shrugged, that's for sure.

Is there some kind of fucking PEN Award or Pulitzer for blog commentary? If so, I'm nominating this entire thread. You hilarious people made me feel like I've actually read The Great Door Stopper, I mean, "Atlas Shrugged," which I so cleverly managed to avoid all the way thru grad school.

snugbug

@Botswana Meat Commission FC: Yah, don't ever tell any male under the age of 24 that you've watched it.