Who is John Galt?

[Keith Whitener]

http://utopianist.com/2011/02/new-trailer-for-atlas-shrugged-released/

What's next? Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Plato's Dialogues? How do you make a movie about how it's the actors and director who are important and anyone else who made the movie? Isn't the alienating most of your audience? "Yeah, screw me!"

[Christina]

Meh. It's no Battlefield Earth.

[Keith Whitener]

Meh. It's no Battlefield Earth.

I think this might be worse.

[Pidgeon]

If the whole movie is tilted to one side like Battlefield Earth, then it might be worse.

[cavorting with nudists]

"Worse" is a subjective matter (not that this doesn't look to me like one of the worst movies ever made), but perhaps we can focus our inquiries on whether a given movie is the right movie at the right time.

To me, a movie taking the POV of our corporate overlords seems pretty spectactulalry ill-timed. Am I wrong?

[Lothar_Brightblade]

What I can't believe is that they are splitting this up. The movies are going to have to rely on the others for a collective goodness, and the individual film will mean nothing.

I went to a sort of conservative school that had a top business program and would walk by a car quite often that had "JHNGLT" as its license plate number.

[Sarah]

I find Ayn Rand unutterably silly.  And most of the people who still like her books after they've gotten out of their teens/early twenties don't seem to realize how badly they would fare in a world run her way.  Are there enough of them to make the three movies that will make up this cinematic masterpiece profitable?  I doubt it.  But then I'm often wrong when it comes to predicting how dumb the world can be.

[Alex_from_the_woods]

Atlas Shrugged is such a spectacularly moronic piece of crap. I recommend everyone force themselves to read the book. If you take a look around at, say,  the economic melt-down, health care "debate", the loss of manufacturing jobs, it explains a lot. The G.W. Bush administration was an 8 year infomercial for this crap.

We should all just quit whining and do as we're told.

[Sarah]

What I love is that people who subscribe to Rand's worldview assume they'll be among those who give the orders.  It's like how everyone is the reincarnation of royalty.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Atlas Shrugged is such a spectacularly moronic piece of crap. I recommend everyone force themselves to read the book. If you take a look around at, say,  the economic melt-down, health care "debate", the loss of manufacturing jobs, it explains a lot. The G.W. Bush administration was an 8 year infomercial for this crap.

We should all just quit whining and do as we're told.

I actually think it was an infomercial against that crap.

Has anyone thought to do a search-and-replace of "Arcade Fire" with "John Galt" in http://whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com ?

[buffcoat]

What I love is that people who subscribe to Rand's worldview assume they'll be among those who give the orders.  It's like how everyone is the reincarnation of royalty.

I agree with this point mightily.  You might also add that her strident atheism matched her strident capitalism, but many of the people she's most influenced just refuse to believe or ignore or defend that part as "she didn't really mean it" or something along those lines.  Note: she meant it.

The other thing is that, regardless of whether you take any of her capitalist ideas to heart, there's also a lot of other weird shit in there.  The rape/rape fantasy stuff, for example, that pervades her work.

On the other hand, years of experience tell me that I'm about the most economically conservative member of this board (which ain't sayin' a lot), so I don't utterly reject ALL of the stuff Rand talks about as easily as some of you seem to.  I've heard firsthand some of the bad and weird anti-capitalist, "you don't deserve to be able to earn the money you do" stuff that she wrote about coming out of people's mouths, and it's distressing to those of us who kind of do think we deserve to be able to earn the money we do.

I still don't think I'd see this movie, though.

[Keith Whitener]

To me, a movie taking the POV of our corporate overlords seems pretty spectactulalry ill-timed. Am I wrong?

I think that's part of what makes it seem so bad to me. It's like if someone made a film about transfats and targeted toward people who've had heart attacks.

[Christina]

What I can't believe is that they are splitting this up.

I went to a sort of conservative school that had a top business program and would walk by a car quite often that had "JHNGLT" as its license plate number.

To the first: I know, right?
To the second: Jesus christ.

[Christina]

I still don't think I'd see this movie, though.

I probably will - Fountainhead is absolutely ridiculous and therefore very fun to watch.

[Pidgeon]

At least they're not adapting We the Living.