I recall that Battlefield: Earth was originally going to be “multiple parts”.
Now I have a mental image of the Hubbard Space telescope discovering Xenu and spacegoing DC-3s and whatnot…
I quite enjoy The Fountainhead movie. It’s an Art Deco masterpiece of camp. With beautiful young Patricia Neal, who was having an affair with beautiful older Gary Cooper at the time. He refused to leave his wife & she had a nervous breakdown. I love vintage celebrity gossip! Endless stints in rehab lack style…
I read the book &* Atlas Shrugged* because some high school friends loved them; they were the AV crowd, wielding their slide rules even outside the math & science classrooms. Had no trouble getting through Rand’s dense prose, even though I didn’t enjoy it much.
That same year I read T H White’s The Once & Future King & Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Plus the Ballantine LOTR–gaudy covers & all.
Guess which books have remained part of my life!
(Set in an interesting alternate world & edited down to one film, Atlas might be worth seeing. That apparently isn’t the case with this film.)
[post=13512683]Link[/post].
I assume other people watched the trailer - did you folks find the delivery of dialogue in it to be weird too? Maybe it’s true to the book, but it has the same off feel a lot of commercials for prescription drugs have.
Legal blog Above the Law reports that Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit, saw an advance screening of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 and gave it a perfect 10 out of 10. The blog includes a link to his imdb review. Based on his other reviews there, though, I don’t think he has very good taste in films.
I skipped it. Just read it for the first time last autumn. I liked it well enough, but I don’t drink her brand of Kool-Aid™.
Looking forward to the film. I find the timing to be ironic as all hell. The anti-union sentiments sweeping a country that is collapsing as the rich get richer. Either the film will be a watershed moment and everyone will relate to it, or it’ll bomb. I predict the former.
Cartooniverse
Jeez, have you seen The Fountainhead? Rand had final approval of all the dialogue, so everyone spoke like she did, but without the Russian accent. The only believable actor was Patricia Neal. (Of course, part of her radiance was a result of getting shtupped by Gary Cooper.)
I read the book a few years ago and didn’t get much out if it.
My memory of it was some lady tying to build railroad tracks but her brother (dad?) who was really the owner of the company, didn’t want to use the supplies she had procured. He wanted to use older, cheaper steel and supplies. She wanted the newer, high tech stuff.
Then there was a bunch of wheeling and dealing to get the train track built.
The story to me was dull and the characters were wealthy industrialists that I couln’t relate to.
Having not enjoyed the book, I am highly unlikely to sit through a two part film about it unless there are reports of top-notch acting, interesting sets, or some other redeeming feature.
Roger Ebert gave it 1 star. Yes I know, he’s a liberal. He makes no bones about it. But he brings up some good points.
Also, I like this Twitter post from him:
They should have just made a Bioshock film
I was assigned to read parts of Ayn Rand in college, much like many other people here. In honor of the movie’s release I thought back to those heady days and wrote the following blog post: [ulr=“http://theblogthatwasthursday.wordpress.com/”]How Ayn Rand Changed My Life.
It has received a glorious 6% at Rotten Tomatoes.
I’ve been reading the reviews, and sadly although I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time (I’m an unapologetic *Atlas Shrugged *fan–read it for the first time at age 13), I’m very much afraid I’m going to be disappointed. I’m planning to go see it tomorrow–wouldn’t miss it, no matter how bad it ends up being–but I really do wish they’d have been able to get some bigger guns and a bigger budget to do it right. I was so hoping they’d do it in a timeless, dieselpunk, art-deco aesthetic rather than trying to set it in the near future.
I don’t have high expectations. I cheerfully admit to loving some pretty bad movies (the Z-list horror flick “The Manitou” is one of my favorite films) so hey, I could be surprised. I mean, at least the book made it to the screen in my lifetime. That’s something. And maybe since it’s so low-budget, they’ll make enough money that they’ll be able to make the other two parts.
Well, report back after you see it, and let us know what you thought.
It’s only the second most influential book after the Bible.
Just sayin’…if you thought *Atlas Shrugged *was about railroad tycoons and industrialists, you kind of missed the point. 
No problem with anybody disliking the book. I know a lot of folks do. But saying *AS *is about trains is kind of like saying Moby-Dick was about a whale.
Well, there are already twelve user reviews at IMDb, so *somebody *has seen it other than Roger.
The film has a 6% rating at Rotten Tomatoes! (Kyle Smith of The New York Post liked it!)
I believe the readers of the Koran might disagree.