Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

I was promised a recession.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

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Reader Interactions

237Comments

  3. 3.

    beltane

    I now hate you Doug. I watched this POS hoping to come away with a laugh, but all I got was the most boring movie trailer EVER. I give the director credit for making two minutes feel like two hours.

  5. 5.

    Dan

    I’ve felt that movies have gone on too long, but that is the first time I felt a trailer has gone on too long.

  6. 6.

    Steve L.

    I can’t see how they can make this movie with changing parts of the book, which will send the Rand fans into fits of hysteria.

    In other words, this is going to be EPIC.

  10. 10.

    Carwin

    One thing that definitely comes across is the ridiculousness of the plot, and how absolutely, almost grotesquely, inane the dialogue is.

    Is it just me, did this also highlight how fucking stupid the “Who is John Galt?” part of the book is as well?

    For all their love of cutting spending they manage to waste money on this? That’s teatards for you.

  11. 11.

    beltane

    @Jay in Oregon: Wise decision. If you get out of the boat you will nearly die from boredom. Here’s a summary:

    Blah, blah, blah. Cars, a blond female human, more blah, blah, blah. “I only care about making money”. Music. Blah, blah, blah.

  15. 15.

    demkat620

    Oh good lord!
    Prediction One: If it’s a hit proof that Hollywood has been wrong about people wanting to see Conservative movies
    Prediction Two: Movie flops and Conservatives whine that prejudiced, liberal Hollywood just didn’t spend enough money to promote the GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME.

    Either way they win.

  16. 16.

    Citizen Alan

    I feel like Charlton Heston at the end of “Planet of the Apes.” OH MY GOD! THOSE MANIACS FINALLY DID IT! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!

  17. 17.

    Pooh

    Hopefully this film provides as much intentionally unintentional comedy as did the fascist opus that was Starship Troopers.

  19. 19.

    EvolutionaryDesign

    This is going to make Passion money, I can already tell. Anyone know if Mel Gibson has a hand in this?

  20. 20.

    R-Jud

    @Pooh:

    Hopefully this film provides as much intentionally unintentional comedy as did the fascist opus that was Starship Troopers.

    Yessss. Exactly what I was thinking.

    “It’s afraid!”

  22. 22.

    dr. luba

    I didn’t realize, until I was halfway through it, that the Justin Bieber trailer wasn’t part of the post, but was an actual ad. It was shorter and much less objectionable than the AS one, and the film looks astronomically more entertaining.

    Why do I suspect there will never actually be an AS Part 2 (unless funded as a non-profit venture by the Koch brothers)?

  23. 23.

    Tokyokie

    A multipart “Atlas Shrugged” is even more depressing than the plans for parts 4 & 5 of “The Matrix.”

  25. 25.

    Southern Beale

    Part one? You mean … there’s gonna be a FRANCHISE? Dear lord.

    I always thought railroads were a really bad industry to set a modern-day Libertarian fantasy. Once upon a time railroads were the goliaths of industry but those days are long past. Now in most peoples’ minds railroads are socialisticky operations sucking at the taxpayer teat.

    They should have changed it from railroads and steel to … I dunno, oil companies or something.

  26. 26.

    Alex S.

    This is like Once upon a time in the West, but this time, Claudia Cardinale and Henry Ford form an alliance. And there’s no Harmonica.

  27. 27.

    beltane

    @Pooh: In order for there to be unintentional comedy the audience would have to remain awake. Judging by the trailer I just don’t see that happening.

  29. 29.

    Southern Beale

    Part one? You mean … there’s gonna be a FRANCHISE? Dear lord.

    I always thought railroads were a really bad industry to set a modern-day Libertarian fantasy. Once upon a time railroads were the goliaths of industry but those days are long past. Now in most peoples’ minds railroads are soc1alist1cky operations sucking at the taxpayer teat.

    They should have changed it from railroads and steel to … I dunno, oil companies or something.

  33. 33.

    McWaffle

    I agree with Southern Beale. As a Wisconsinite, the idea of trains being hailed as some capitalist dream is ridiculously ironic.

  36. 36.

    Tokyokie

    Even worse, the director, who’s never made a theatrical feature before, is playing the lead. omigawd.

  41. 41.

    Scott

    When your end-of-trailer zinger line is “To a successful business partnership,” audiences are going to laugh, and for all the wrong reasons.

  44. 44.

    Pooh

    @NSinNY: HER FATHER IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY!

    oh, my fault, I thought this was a game of “quote your favorite bit of wingnut overacting”

    ETA: GIVE ME BACK MY SON!

  47. 47.

    dr. luba

    @Tokyokie: According to imdb:

    According to Variety, The Godfather (1972) producer Albert S. Ruddy spent years trying to bring the novel to the big screen, attracting the interest of Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway along the way…. Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among the actresses considered to play Dagny Taggart, with Brad Pitt being considered to play John Galt.

    But they chose to go with Taylor Schilling and Paul Johansson?

  48. 48.

    Southern Beale

    oh, my fault, I thought this was a game of “quote your favorite bit of wingnut overacting”

    “This is Jack Bauer with CTU! Drop the gun!”

    Okay I know Kiefer isn’t a wingnut but I always thought that was the lamest scriptwriting I’d ever seen anywhere. Why would a terrorist drop his or her weapons just because someone named Jack Bauer with CTU told them to?

  49. 49.

    MonkeyBoy

    Randians are famous for rigging polls. There are several where Rand’s books were voted as the most important books in the world (and I am talking polls of the general population, not Randians).

    I’m sure they will be able to rig an Oscar nomination and there will be intense pressure to vote for the film.

    Hopefully when it doesn’t win they will all go Galt.

  51. 51.

    cmorenc

    I was about to be grateful someone (re?)made a movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” so that I could avoid any possibility of temptation to ever waste my time reading it, UNTIL I saw at the end of the trailer: “Part 1”.

    It was at that point it hit me (as with many of you) just how long and draggy the trailer was, turning two or three minutes into what seemed like twenty or thirty. Eggggh! Who the hell cares who John Galt is or was?

  52. 52.

    And the Horse He Rode In on

    @beltane: A movie with Debbie Gibson, a giant octopus and a shark biting planes and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was fantastic!

  53. 53.

    beltane

    @dr. luba: Well, the film did attract the attention of all of us here which means we’re just like Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood. “Attention” can also mean mockery and ridicule.

  56. 56.

    Tom Hilton

    That looks unbelievably (no, make that believably) terrible. I recognized some fun character actors in the trailer, though: Armin Shimerman (Principal Skinner, Quark), Patrick Fischler (the conspiracy-theorist bookstore guy in season 4 of Angel), Geoff Pierson (Chief of Police in Dexter). They won’t make it worth watching, though.

  59. 59.

    EvolutionaryDesign

    @Pooh: I think when Heinlein wrote the book he was serious. When Verhoeven made it a film, I think all he wanted was alien vagina faces.

  61. 61.

    cmorenc

    Does a trailer for a film about Justin Bieber pop up underneath the “Atlas Shrugged” trailer on everyone else’s screen after you click on the latter to watch it? What a nausea-inducing double-header we have here.

  62. 62.

    dr. luba

    @beltane: True WRT 1972.

    For the second bit of trivia, I figured more along the line of “I considered the homecoming queen and the totally hot girl next door for my prom dates, but decided to take my sister.” Sometimes decisions are made for us.

  65. 65.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @Southern Beale:

    Now in most peoples’ minds railroads are soc1alist1cky operations sucking at the taxpayer teat.

    Well railroads in America were huge soshialistical enterprises right from the start. They would not have existed were it not for subsidies in the form of enormous land grants from government.

    Then there is the fact that they were managed by people who made Bernie Madoff look fiscally responsible.

    But I’m pretty sure that they had exciting sex lives.

  66. 66.

    shortstop

    Apart from all the usual solid criticisms of Rand’s work, one thing that’s always really bugged me, and that I never see discussed anywhere, is how completely indifferent to environmental concerns it is.

    Part of that is the standards of the time in which it was created, so I always assumed that if they made a modern movie of AS, they’d carefully eliminate all the (for example) phallic smokestack worship of the book. But from the fleeting glimpse of Rearden’s mills in this trailer, I see they’re going for the gusto in celebrating the rank pollution that is the product of Truly Free Enterprise.

  68. 68.

    Southern Beale

    I eagerly await this film’s massive box office FAIL which will be blamed on librul Hollywood elites not, ya know, the Free Hand of the Market gloriously flipping Ayn Rand the bird.

    That’s gonna be fun.

  69. 69.

    Mattminus

    I’m hoping for a sex scene interspersed with shots of the stupid train going through a tunnel.

    That would be Randian subtlety, I believe.

  70. 70.

    Pooh

    @EvolutionaryDesign: I don’t remember the book being as overtly fascist as it was nationalist, though I’m probably missing some of he historical context of the book (was it Vietnam era? Korea?)

  72. 72.

    Alex S.

    @EvolutionaryDesign:

    high-speed rail…phallic symbol? Building a railway at odds with the public interest…rape? This woman so determined to build the train… does she have rape fantasies?

  73. 73.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @Pooh: @Pooh:

    Yes, yes it does, though I’ve never quite figured out if it was intended as satire or not.

    Watch “Soldier of Orange”, then you’ll see where Verhoeven is coming from.

  74. 74.

    dr. luba

    @cmorenc: The Bieber is actually more of a palate-cleanser to get rid of the horrible Atlas Shrugged aftertaste……

    Saw him on The Daily Show the other night; he played along nicely, and I find I hate him much less than I used to.

  77. 77.

    Pooh

    @Mattminus: To be fair, Hitchcock was a fan of that. Of course in his time, the film code required the train, erm, money shot to substitute for any naughty bits.

  79. 79.

    Suck It Up!

    I’m pretty good at looking at much shorter trailers and being able to tell whether the movie will be good or not.

    This movie is going to suck. hard.

  80. 80.

    MikeJ

    @ruemara: That and Verhoeven knew exactly which buttons he was pressing with the fascist imagery. He did a great job of building the world his characters lived in. I don’t think he ever said it was a world that people should aspire to.

    Nobody seems to confuse Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner world with a political manifesto. Why can’t people understand Verhoeven?

  82. 82.

    Zifnab

    @Guster: Not just trains. Supertrains!

    This is one of those hippie liberal douchebag tricks! They’re trying to get us to use public transportation, those bastards.

  83. 83.

    Suck It Up!

    Spoiler Alert: In the finale Obama will be using TARP funds to save Galt’s company and Galt will end up killing himself over it.

  85. 85.

    dr. luba

    @shortstop: Not merely indifferent.

    “If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. . . . Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent ‘Thank you’ to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.”

    —Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Return of the Primitive, p. 278

    Ignoring, of course, that life expectancy has been lengthening in the west due to socialistic public health measures like vaccination and clean water.

  87. 87.

    shortstop

    The enormous suckitude of this movie will not be reflected in the box office receipts. FOX is going to flog this harder than it shilled the teabagger rallies.

  88. 88.

    Ash Can

    @shortstop:

    how completely indifferent to environmental concerns it is.

    Feature, not bug. Nature exists to yield resources and be exploited by the ubermenschen. (What were we saying about Rand’s rape fantasies?)

  89. 89.

    Pooh

    @MikeJ: Not to let this thread devolve into strokey-beard film debate (too late), but I don’t think it’s really correct to say Verhoeven knew EXACTLY what buttons he was pressing if the parody was unintentional. I mean, Neil. Patrick. Harris.

  90. 90.

    Citizen_X

    @Tokyokie: That’s the director? I was thinking, “WTF? Rand Paul’s in a movie now?”

    And nothing says thriving, technologically advanced American industries in the 21st century like 1) trains, and 2) steel mills.

  91. 91.

    gbear

    @Pooh: Well, there are intentional intentionals; there are things we know are intentional.
    We also know there are intentional unintentionals; that is to say we know there are some things unintended.
    But there are also unintentional unintentionals – the ones we don’t know it they intended to be unintentional.

  92. 92.

    shortstop

    @Ash Can: I know; I’m very familiar with the philosophy, but my point is that openly discussing their philosophy is not something they can get away with in 2011. Just as Rand Paul wouldn’t come out and say he wanted the Civil Rights Act repealed even after Rachel Maddow expertly badgered him for 10 minutes, they know on some level that discharging gazillions of pollutants and carcinogens is not likely to buy the love of the average American. Today’s libertarians dance around that stuff when they’re not by themselves. Looks like this movie doesn’t.

  93. 93.

    Southern Beale

    @Suck It Up!:

    Spoiler Alert: In the finale Obama will be using TARP funds to save Galt’s company and Galt will end up killing himself over it.

    { golf clap }

    On a related note, I seem to recall the Recovery Act included a small pittance for Hollywood movie production, which got the wingnuts all foamy-mouthed about. Would be hilarious if this film benefitted in some way from that.

  94. 94.

    hitchhiker

    Wait, a movie about svelte middle-aged tycoons screwing each other while they struggle not to let the fat, greasy talentless politicians steal their wealth?

    And people say that conservatives aren’t capable of irony!

    Okay, full disclosure . . . when I was a high school freshman in 1966 I thought Dagny Taggart was all that and a bag of chips. But — I swear! — only because I didn’t know any actual women who got away with that level of bitchy. And I had a roaring inner bitch just dying to get out.

  96. 96.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @dr. luba: The fact that he put a beard on and said “he looks like a girl” made me respect him a whole lot more. He’s laughing at it all as well.

  97. 97.

    Fair Economist

    Why is anybody surprised at the “Part One” business? It’s a long book with a complicated plot. It wouldn’t even remotely fit into one movie.

    It’s certainly a slow trailer. Plus, where’ the dystopic feel of the book? Or the sense of conflicting visions of society? If the trailer is even remotely representative, they’ve ditched most of what’s appealing from the book.

    As an aside, Rand wanted Farrah Fawcett to play Dagny. That would have been a twist! (and an improvement over this Dagny, who looks like she’s started Botox at an early age).

  98. 98.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @MikeJ:

    That and Verhoeven knew exactly which buttons he was pressing with the fascist imagery.

    Verhoeven was a kid in Nazi occupied Netherlands. In Starship Troopers he is mocking the overt fascist imagery that he grew up with. Those propaganda vignettes in the movie are modeled on the ones the Nazis showed in movie theatres across their occupied territories.

    So yes, the Starship Troopers movie is anti-fascist. The book on the other hand …

  100. 100.

    shortstop

    @hitchhiker: High-school freshmen are supposed to think Dagny Taggart is all that and a bag of chips. The problem develops when people reach age 24 and haven’t begun to revise that view.

  101. 101.

    Jorge

    I want magic engines, hidden mountain cities, industrial sized hologram projectors, sonic super weapons, and modern day terror-pirates.

  106. 106.

    TomG

    Paul Verhoeven directed the original Robocop (1987), which was gleefully over the top. As I understand it, the cuts demanded by the studio or the ratings board removed most of the “obviousness” of the satire he intended. There is an unrated version I haven’t seen – presumably closer to what he had in mind.

    Also, I actually like the novel Atlas Shrugged. I won’t claim it is great literature; it isn’t. But I like it.

  107. 107.

    JPL

    After watching the video, I realized that this is an open thread for music videos…
    Here’s mine link

    btw ..how high is the sky?

  108. 108.

    Nylund

    Long story short, someone paid $1 million for the rights to make a movie, but would lose those rights unless they actually started making something by June 15, 2010. On June 13, they started shooting this. In short, this version may have been more about not losing movie rights than it was making a good movie.

  109. 109.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Pooh:

    Now, now. The entire point of Starship Troopers, the movie, was, and this is Verhoeven speaking, “war makes fascists of us all”.

    Actually, I find it brilliant, if only for casting Doogie Howser, M.D., as a prominent fascist. Neil Patrick Harris is terrific in it.

  111. 111.

    MikeJ

    @Tokyokie:

    Even worse, the director, who’s never made a theatrical feature before, is playing the lead. omigawd.

    Not just never directed a theatrical feature, looking at IMDB I don’t see a lot of experience acting in them.

    This is also the only credit for one of the writers. The other writer brought us the classics Evilution, Basement Jack, and Cemetery Gates. Keats and Yeats are *not* on his side.

  114. 114.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    The vignettes are as much modeled on Allied propaganda as they are on Nazi propaganda. There’s more than a little “Why We Fight” in Starship Troopers.

  119. 119.

    cyntax

    @shortstop:

    The enormous suckitude of this movie will not be reflected in the box office receipts. FOX is going to flog this harder than it shilled the teabagger rallies.

    Absolutely. Beck and O’Reilly and all of Fox’s also-rans (Malkin, etc.) are going to be doing backflips for this thing.

    And imagine all the pop-culture prognostication that Redstate will try to hang from this thing: Box office success = vindication of everything.

  120. 120.

    Lynn Dee

    “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?” Good stuff.

    And who doesn’t excited by all those speeding trains?

    No tunnels, though? :D

  121. 121.

    Citizen_X

    @Fair Economist:

    Why is anybody surprised at the “Part One” business?

    Because, for most movies, they actually want an audience to show up?

    Jeez, two or three full-length movies of boring-ass, anachronistic, libertarian cant? Fergit it. I mean, they could at least set it in some parallel-world mid-20th-century America so it makes a little bit of goddamned sense.

    Maybe that’s it: it’s supposed to fail, a la Springtime for Hitler.

  126. 126.

    jimmiraybob

    Steve L. @ 6 – …which will send the Rand fans into fits of hysteria.

    Almost like when a child somewhere in American gets food and medicine through Gubmint assistance instead of just politely yielding to the elements?

  127. 127.

    eyelessgame

    “All I care about is making money.” It’s _Wall Street_ with Gordon Gecko as the good guy. Audiences are going to laugh at all the wrong places when this trailer hits.

    And trains. Oh jesus trains. This really is Battlefield Earth bad.

  128. 128.

    EvolutionaryDesign

    @Nylund: Ha! That’s exactly what happened with the (original) Fantastic Four movie (1994). It’s hard to find, but what a glorious mess.

  129. 129.

    Taylor

    If you haven’t been exposed to Randism, rent The Foundainhead or watch it on TCM. At least you get Patricia Neal drooling over Gary Cooper, and Raymond Massey being Raymond Massey.

    The dialog (Rand did the screenplay) is Ed Wood-level stupid.

    But what really stands out is the dripping contempt for “the little people.”

  130. 130.

    burnspbesq

    On a brighter note, Rolling Stone is reporting on a possible Buffalo Springfield tour later this year. That would be a “fly anywhere, pay anything” event, AFAIC.

  131. 131.

    BR

    Um…why are brilliant industrialists supporting some Eurocommie thing like high speed rail? Clearly they’d be drilling for oil and drinking milkshakes. Oh, wait, that was There Will Be Blood.

  132. 132.

    TomG

    @118, Lynn Dee. Actually there’s a plot point involving a tunnel that got brief mention in that trailer.

    Personally I was looking to find Francisco D’Anconia – an over the top billionaire mine owner who uses his playboy celebrity status to hide his own dark secret….(that he’s best friends with Rearden /jk).

  136. 136.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Southern Beale:

    It will be interesting to see how they avoid contract law and the court system, not to mention the entire real property title system.

    I guess they’ll just shoot anyone who they think crosses them.

  137. 137.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Southern Beale:

    It will be interesting to see how they avoid contract law and the court system, not to mention the entire real property title system.

    I guess they’ll just shoot anyone who they think crosses them.

  139. 139.

    Dave in NYC

    I actually enjoyed the book until I got to the point where the climax was a boring, 50-page long speech. It makes you realize that the people in the book aren’t really the characters; the ideas are the characters, and the people are just mouthpieces for them. That can work in novel form, but in a movie it will be epically bad.

    It’s the same reason why as far as I know, nobody’s made a decent movie version of an Aldous Huxley novel (and Huxley’s books weren’t 1000+ pages long).

    I will say, I think today’s so-called conservatives, if they have even read the book, have learned almost nothing from it.

  140. 140.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Okay, I will be generous here. My billing rate for consumer law cases (my lowest billing rate) is $250 an hour. I bill in 1/10 of an hour increments. You owe me $25.00.

  141. 141.

    JPL

    Doug.. Please go on Media Matters and watch Beck’s show tonight and then tell us what he says…
    A friend called earlier and mentioned that he said The Google was the problem but I didn’t quite believe it until I watched it.

  145. 145.

    Brad Hanon

    I could not help but wholeheartedly agree with the intense, trailer-closing line: “I’ll drink to that.”

    I drank my way through The Pirate Movie, Troll 2, Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li, Turkish Star Wars, and The Ten Commandments: The Musical, and I will damn well drink my way through this. I expect hilarity.

  147. 147.

    Viva BrisVegas

    There are lots of interesting questions about this movie.

    Like who the hell is Paul Johansson, and where did he get the $15 million that IMDB says is budgeted for the movie? Is that Dentist money or real money?

  148. 148.

    sacman701

    Agree with #119, if you’re going to do this at all you have to set it in the 1950s, when railroads and steel actually were dominant industries and socialism hadn’t been discredited.

  149. 149.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @shortstop: Sorry. It is directed at DougJ(r).

    ETA: I fee he owes me for making me watch that trailer. It is two and a half minutes I will never get back so I would like to be compensated.

  151. 151.

    Jay B.

    It’s a long book with a complicated plot. It wouldn’t even remotely fit into one movie.

    Fuck that, “Rich People are our Moral Superiors, you Statist Parasite. So get ready for Galtian Rapture.” pretty much covers it. Give me a weekend and an eighth of coke and I could crank out a shitty script that, at the very least would end a coherent movie in 90 minutes. When writers are too close to the source material (and it’s obvious that a true-believer took on this assignment) they feel that they can’t cut anything.

    But it’s VERY easy for a hater do it in a novel that has a 70-fucking-page monologue on Objectivism larded inside it.

  153. 153.

    kdaug

    @drew42:

    With the choppy editing and uneven audio, it comes across as a parody trailer, where they make a comedy look like a horror/thriller.

    Or the reverse (this is awesome, trust me.)

  156. 156.

    James Hare

    @Chuck Butcher:
    That’s what got me about Atlas Shrugged — I’m supposed to believe in a) an amazing alloy that is stronger than steel but about 1/4 as cheap, b) a magical oil shale extraction method that is cheaper than traditional drilling and c) a magical engine for trains that runs on static electricity.

    I didn’t even get past the static electricity train. I was riding on a real train from Vermont to Washington, DC (a 13 hour trip) and that book bored me so much I decided to sleep rather than read. I’m not sure what that woman was trying to prove, but all I got from the book was that I really hated tedious businessmen who harangued folks about their excuse for being greedy shits.

  160. 160.

    hamletta

    The Fountainhead was especially awful (and hilarious!) because Rand insisted on writing the screenplay.

    What’s these clowns’ excuse?

  161. 161.

    Polar Bear Squares

    Why are conservatives/glibertarians still dryhumping this dead woman’s corpse? Must we continue to shower Rand and Reagan’s coffins with so much praise that they drip with saliva?

    Atlas Shrugged is like refusing to hang out with anybody but your small circle of friends in high school. You thought it was cool at first, then you grew up and realized it was a fairly simplistic and selfish view of the world.

    Sorry for being so morbid but damn. Do we really need a movie?

  163. 163.

    El Cid

    @James Hare: Libertarianism of the upfront greediest can work easily when you have magic materials and magic energy sources.

    This is not true for soshullism because soshullists can’t do magic.

  165. 165.

    jeffreyw

    @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Sure thing! Dump your starter out of the plastic mayo jar into the bowl of your mixer. Should be very wet, about 2 or three cups. Add 3 cups AP flour and a cup of water, stir and cover overnight on the counter. Crank up the mixer on low using the dough hook, add 1 t of yeast, 1-1/2 t salt, 4 T sugar, a splash of olive oil, and 1 or 2 T of dry milk. Is the mixture forming a ball? If it looks very liquid and loose, add flour a tablespoon at a time until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. It should still be sticky. Knead for 7 or 8 minutes with the hook. Dump into an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap until it doubles in volume. Dump it onto a floured mat and deflate, then divide into 12 portions as best as you can. Flour your hands and roll these portions into a ball between your palms and array them on a silicone mat on a baking tray. Cover them all again and let them rise some more–an hour or two. Be heating the oven while they rise, start at 425 for the first 6 or 7 minutes then reduce to 375. Use a spray bottle to mist inside the oven every couple of minutes for the first 10 minutes or so. Today the buns took just shy of 25 minutes to bake. Go by the color, or an internal temp of ~195 if you have an instant read thermometer. Cool thoroughly on a rack.
    This recipe gave me 12 buns of a pretty good size, and the crust was chewy, almost could be described as tough. They stood up to the sauce admirably, without falling apart. I recommend them for sloppy joes, Italian beef and like sammiches.

  168. 168.

    Ronald Reagan

    @Southern Beale: This is good, but the Ayn Rand Foundation’s ju-jutsu for students whose high schools have a service requirement for graduation is even better.

    They’ll provide you with a P.R. package and other resources to use as you get your local school board to repeal the service requirement, campaigning for which repeal counts as your community service, nach.

  169. 169.

    Sko Hayes

    The best thing about Battlefield Earth is it got the funniest bad reviews I’ve ever read:

    In case you haven’t seen any pictures, Psychlos are Jamaican Klingons who talk like Ferengi. The primary special effect in the movie is accomplished by filling buckets with dirt and pieces of concrete and then tossing them across the screen. Director Roger Christian has a hard-on for flying dirt like you would not believe. The guys who wrote this should be forced to dictate everything for the rest of their lives so that they can never again touch pen to paper or finger to keyboard and declare themselves writers.(Mr. Cranky)

    Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in “The Fugitive.” I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies. There is a moment here when the Psychlos’ entire planet (home office and all) is blown to smithereens, without the slightest impact on any member of the audience (or, for that matter, the cast). If the film had been destroyed in a similar cataclysm, there might have been a standing ovation. (Roger Ebert)

    The Psychlos reminded me of a cross between Jamaican basketball players with bad teeth and bloated hands and Klingon extras working the Star Trek convention circuit. Travolta’s acting hasn’t been this bad since The Experts or maybe Perfect. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler evolves into William Wallace with lines like ‘You can have your freedom if you fight!’

  170. 170.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    Who bankrolled this? The Kochs or the Anschultz family. God, let the Farelly Brothers make the next one.

  172. 172.

    pseudonymous in nc

    Jeez, two or three full-length movies of boring-ass, anachronistic, libertarian cant? Fergit it.

    It’s made for five-hour DVD marathons — get the box set for a dollar from the Reason Book Club, championing free markets everywhere! — that inevitably result in some unfortunate libertarienne having to fend off the unwanted advances of a pasty peer.

  173. 173.

    West of the Cascades

    Wow. I wonder if they’ve already got “Part 2” in the can or if this may be that rare movie which comes out with the pretension of being a multi-part franchise but stops with “Part 1”? Or maybe Part 2 goes straight to DVD/Special Wingnut Edition?

    Although, if they have the balls to film the entire 60 page John Galt monologue, I would buy a ticket (second run) just to reward that sort of ballsiness. I’d guess that would be about “Part 5,” and I can’t see the franchise lasting that long …

    I am not saying I would sit through the film of the 60 page monologue, just that I would buy a ticket.

  174. 174.

    RossInDetroit

    I’ll bet the skip the part in the book about Reardon’s divorce. James Taggart bones miz Reardon so Reardon pays off a judge to get rid of her. Justice just another commodity with a price.

  175. 175.

    hitchhiker

    You know what would be great? If somebody did one of those fake subtitles thing to this film, where the subtext of every silly speech appears beneath the actors emoting over their glorious ability to produce wealth.

  177. 177.

    hilts

    @JPL:

    Glenn Beck is a raving, drooling, bed-wetting asshole. Tonight he was spinning his bullshit theory about a communist/islamist plot to take over the world.

  178. 178.

    Davis X. Machina

    They should have tried something easier, like filming War and Peace — not the actual novel, mind you, which has been more or less successfully done, but the second epilogue — the reflections on the theory of historiography with which Tolstoy wraps things up.

    Better characters, and more action, than this turkey.

  180. 180.

    Bubblegum Tate

    1) I really enjoyed Starship Troopers much more than I thought I would. I thought it was a pretty slick satire, and I liked the ways Verhoeven used gung-ho war movie tropes to deliver that satire. And yes, NPH is great in it.

    2. This Randian horseshit movie looks like, uh, horseshit. Even the trailer bores me to tears. However, there’s going to be an absolutely epic wingnut freakout when it doesn’t win any Oscars. Andrew Breitbart’s head could very well explode.

  181. 181.

    gnomedad

    @Tom Hilton:

    I recognized some fun character actors in the trailer, though: Armin Shimerman (Principal Skinner, Quark)

    Maybe he’ll appear as Quark.

  182. 182.

    quaint irene

    Huh. When I looked it up on IMDB the only actor I recognized was Christina Pickles. She of the old ‘St. Elsewhere,’ and a great guest reader on ‘Selected Shorts.’

    if they have the balls to film the entire 60 page John Galt monologue, I would buy a ticket (second run

    I think they’d have to include with your ticket a vial of smelling salts and some injectable adrenaline to help get viewers through the whole excrutiating sequence.

  183. 183.

    ruemara

    I would watch this if there were Big Daddies in it. And it was 20 years after going galt and these people were being cooked.

  184. 184.

    RossInDetroit

    And hey, isn’t that that one guy from that one movie? John Polito. Looked like him. Always good. But probably not good enough to save this.

    ETA: yes, according to IMDB it is.

  185. 185.

    Joseph Nobles

    I don’t get why everybody wants to stop his trains from running all the way down her tracks.

  186. 186.

    Dave in NYC

    Fuck that, “Rich People are our Moral Superiors, you Statist Parasite. So get ready for Galtian Rapture.” pretty much covers it.

    Just curious, have you read the book? Rand certainly has a fetish for engineers and creators of wealth, but the true villains in the book are all rich and powerful too — James Taggart, Reardon’s wife, the Man (or whatever she called the President). And some of the most noble ones are poor, like Taggart’s wife.

    I don’t agree with Rand on many things, but I think she would have little use for most of our political and pundit class of either party.

  187. 187.

    Dave in NYC

    2. However, there’s going to be an absolutely epic wingnut freakout when it doesn’t win any Oscars. Andrew Breitbart’s head could very well explode.

    No, because nobody is going to see it.

  189. 189.

    quaint irene

    And it was 20 years after going galt and these people were being cooked.

    The Randian Apocalypse.

  193. 193.

    uptown

    @James Hare:

    a) an amazing alloy that is stronger than steel but about 1/4 as cheap

    Haven’t these folks heard of economics? If you have a product that is better than steel you charge more for it, not less. Of course if they really believed in “Free Markets”, they would be free of government controls like patents, trade secrets and copyrights.

  195. 195.

    Cacti

    I’ve always wanted to perform a real-time experiment to see how important the Galtian Supermen really are…

    Which would cause a greater disruption to world commerce…

    Every Fortune 500 CEO disappears for a week

    OR

    Every Truck Driver disappears for a week

  196. 196.

    Nicole

    I’m SO going. Opening night. Buying popcorn. Large. I’m a sucker for a train wreck. Especially one with actual trains!

    Christina Pickles! She was the Sorceress in the He-Man movie! It just gets better and better. Twizzlers, too, please.

    I’ve read the novel, too, and I just now remember where I was when I hit John Galt’s 87-page speech: volunteering on the phones for my local public television station’s semi-annual pledge drive. Heh. Hehheheheheheheh.

  197. 197.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @West of the Cascades:

    I wonder if they’ve already got “Part 2” in the can or if this may be that rare movie which comes out with the pretension of being a multi-part franchise but stops with “Part 1”? Or maybe Part 2 goes straight to DVD/Special Wingnut Edition?

    Obviously Part 2 will be made with the guaranteed profits from Part 1.

    This movie cannot fail, it can only be failed.

  198. 198.

    Cacti

    The teeth-achingly bad dialogue was accentuated by the actors seriousness.

    Makes a George Lucas script sound like Shakespeare.

  199. 199.

    The Other Chuck

    Maybe it’ll get the Wingnuts out in force pushing for high speed rail.

    But I guess only if it runs on magic metal with a magic engine funded by magic capital fairies.

  200. 200.

    Zach

    Everyone’s going to go nuts when this gets no awards nominations because the labor was non-union. Oh, wait, no it wasn’t.

  201. 201.

    Dave in NYC

    Every Fortune 500 CEO disappears for a week

    What makes you think Rand would have blindly cared about Fortune 500 CEOs? The villain of the book, James Taggart, was the CEO of the largest railroad in the country.

  202. 202.

    Goblin Girl

    When I was younger, I thought Atlas Shrugged would make a good movie. I liked the plot of it, so I picked up a copy.

    Then I read the damn thing, and realised it’s unfilmable.

    After seeing this trailer, my conclusion was correct.

    I attribute my foolishness (thinking Atlas could be a good film) to the naiveite of being young and knowing little about the real world. Rand, however, was much older than I was when she wrote Atlas, so what’s her excuse? Rarely have I read such a simplistic novel ever. And over 1000 pages!

    The lead actress is horrible as well. Blank delivery.

    The film is nicely shot, though, but with the HD video equipment they have now, they can make anything look good.

    This could be another cult classic like The Room.

  203. 203.

    Cacti

    @Dave in NYC:

    What makes you think Rand would have blindly cared about Fortune 500 CEOs?

    Doesn’t matter what Rand would have cared about. It’s the group most likely to think of themselves as Galtian Supermen, who the world couldn’t do without.

    Rand was also a pro-choice atheist, but that doesn’t stop anti-choice god botherers from admiring her philosophy.

  204. 204.

    Seanly

    They all seemed like a bunch of douchebag rich people. Except for the toady-looking people talking about taking their metal away. Why not just give the villains hunchbacks and huge hooked noses?

    All the trailer did was remind me of how horrible a book it was and how glad I am that I escaped from the web of her crappy plots and cardboard characters assholes.

  205. 205.

    Janeane The Acerbic Goblin

    I assume it’s going to go direct to DVD.

    A bunch of right wing think tanks will buy it to prop up its sales, making it look like it’s a hit and drum up some propaganda that Hollywood is trying to suppress it.

    I remember when David Zucker’s An American Carol came out a few years back (it was a “satire” on leftists) and despite a big push by its studio (it opened wide its first week), it bombed with the public and critics. Some conservative bloggers claimed a conspiracy to shut the film down, but it’s a wretched piece of work that no one wanted to see. A shame, as Zucker is one of the original Airplane/Naked Gun creators.

  206. 206.

    RossInDetroit

    An add at the bottom of this page urges me to Find Right-Winh T-shirts & Gear. From Tea Party tees to liberal-bashing bumper stickers, etc…

    They really haven’t got this web ads thing figured out yet, have they? Gods help us when they do.

  207. 207.

    shawntos

    Everyone needs to chill out on the “wingers are going to flip out when it wins no awards” song and dance. It will most certainly win awards or have you folks never heard of The Razzies.

  209. 209.

    harlana

    I never read the book but it was written in 1957.

    Trains? I mean, really? It’s 2011, we don’t do trains anymore.

  216. 216.

    Mo's Bike Shop

    Frosty the Strawman

    Rape on the Tracks

    Puberty Forever!

    …Oh, they’re sticking with ‘Atlas Shrugged’?

  219. 219.

    KevinNYC

    This is not a Hollywood production. The producer is John Aglialoro who is the head the Cybex which makes gym equipment. He also plays tournament poker.

    They went into production on this movie because he was about to lose the rights to the book. He had a 15 year lease on the movie rights. They originally were going to do this as a big budget movie, but they had to rush and Aglialoro is financing it not a studio. He is a committed Objectivist.
    Much of the movie is going to be greenscreened.

    Some people think there’s no way you can do Atlas Shrugged justice with a $5 to $10 million budget. What do you say to them?
    Aglialoro: The full budget is actually much bigger. Remember that in August 1992 I had paid a million dollars or so to Leonard Peikoff for the movie rights. You do add the rights costs to the costs of the movie.

    And then there were additional costs along the way. Jim Hart did a very nice script early on. He also wrote Hook and Contact. There were other versions of the script. And there were a lot of other development costs — meetings, travel, legal fees. Those costs since 1992 run between $10 and $15 million.

    I think the production costs for this movie are going to run about $10 million. And then we’ll have the marketing costs and some small return on capital.
    If the movie does come out in the middle of April we will be costing it right up until then. We still have a fair number of people on the payroll. So we’re looking at total costs of $25 million or more.

    But also look at what we got with our production budget. For example, we used red camera technology to film it. It creates digital images rather than images on film. Its software is great for editing. We were able to get the director’s cut of the movie and add some very good visual scenes and other elements in weeks rather than the months it would have taken with film. So it is high tech, and we didn’t scrimp on using red camera.

    We also used a fair amount of green screens where we were able to insert some great visual effects and breathtaking scenes. After the director’s cut we had a team that went out to Colorado for two weeks to shoot mountains, valleys, railroads, moving trains, tracks, all sorts of things. I had one professional studio head take a look at the movie, and we think it has the look and feel of a movie with $30 million in production costs.

  220. 220.

    Stephen J

    I remember reading Atlas Shrugged in the mid-’60s and thinking how much it resembled the fractured long-winded pseudo-intellectual nonsense spouted by my A-Head friends, (the term for speed freaks back then), after being on a 3 week sleepless high.

    It’s amazing Rand’s creepy stuff went anywhere, except of course she did provide a certain faux-intellectual argument in support of selfishness and self absorbtion which appealed to the wealthy pseudo-aristocrats and meshed with Milton Friedman’s destructive economic theories.

  221. 221.

    Donald G

    @Zifnab:

    @Guster: Not just trains. Supertrains!
    —
    This is one of those hippie liberal douchebag tricks! They’re trying to get us to use public transportation, those bastards.

    Did someone mention “Supertrain”?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUERtAe73NI

    May this film do the Rand fetishist what “Supertrain” did to NBC and Fred Silverman’s carreer.

  222. 222.

    eyelessgame

    Christina Pickles? I only know her as Ross and Monica’s mother on Friends.

    And so she plays, what, Reardon’s mother? I’m guessing she’s a bad guy.

  223. 223.

    electricgrendel

    It’s a love story without love. Instead of two attractive oppositely gendered people working together to forge a bond of love, it’s two attractive oppositely gendered people working together to further their love of money. This movie is looking pretty terrible. I cannot wait to see its score on Rotten Tomatoes.

  224. 224.

    Green Eagle

    Has the person who cut this trailer actually watched a professionally cut trailer in the last 20 years? The editing of this thing is ludicrously unsophisticated, and plods along like a bunch of Cub Scouts marching in the local Halloween parade. Add that to the stilted, pompous dialogue and you have a pretty pathetic looking movie.

    And just in case you question my judgement, my wife spent over 2 decades as a trailer producer for major studios, and has more than 20 key art awards. We know trailers in this family.

  225. 225.

    denverjeninpdx

    It should surprise no one to learn that Anschutz film group Walden Media is involved with the production of this film. The conserva-fundy Phil Anschutz who also helped to bank-roll the Narnia trilogy is really carving out a niche for himself in mainstream conservative film-making.

  226. 226.

    Triassic Sands

    I hereby pledge, as a counter to any Randian who will flock to see this crock, that I will NOT SEE Atlas Shrugged (Part any number) a minimum of a million times.

  227. 227.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    So yes, the Starship Troopers movie is anti-fascist. The book on the other hand …

    Isn’t fascistic and anyone who says it is has about as much of a grasp on what fascism is as Jonah Goldberg does. Militaristic, oh yeah. But fascistic. Not even close.

  228. 228.

    Wile E. Quixote

    Someone once pointed out how obsolete Atlas Shrugged was by the time it came out in 1957. By the late 1950s railroads were being supplanted by airplanes and highways. It was like Rand was writing about some weird, alternate history version of 1937.

    Here’s another thing that’s always bugged me about Atlas Shrugged but which doesn’t get a lot of play, even though it exposes a major flaw in Rand’s philosophy and the unrealistic and ahistorical nature of her writing. At one point in the book one of the horrible, evil mooching lowlifes is heard to say “Why should Rearden be the only one who can make Rearden metal”. This is of course meant to show what a horrible fucking moocher this person is. But that raises the question: If someone else can reverse engineer the process for making Rearden metal, why should Rearden be the only one who can make Rearden metal If it’s because Rearden has a patent on the metal then what does it say about his respect for the free market when the only way he can profit from his invention is if he’s allowed to have a monopoly, one enforced by the government at the point of a gun, which is basically what the patent system is.

    Now, you can argue that the patent system is designed to encourage invention by granting inventors a limited monopoly on certain discoveries. Fair enough, and we can then discuss the nature of this monopoly, what its limits should be and how long it should be enforced to balance the benefit it provides to the inventor, a government enforced monopoly, with the benefits it provides to society by encouraging innovation. But I can’t see Rand’s absolutist philosophy tolerating any discussion of those questions. Rearden is the only one who should ever be able to make Rearden metal, and if someone else comes along and figures out how to make it, even if they did so independent of any input from Hank Rearden, they’re a parasitic moocher who’s stealing from him.

    Rand of course stacks the deck by assuming that Hank Rearden is the only guy smart enough to make Rearden metal, that John Galt is the only person smart enough to build an engine that can run on static electricity, that Ellis Wyatt is the only person smart enough to figure out how to refine oil out of shale and so on and so forth, and that no one else will ever come along and discover how to do any of these things, which is completely and totally ignorant, unrealistic and ahistorical. If you want some excellent example of just how ignorant, unrealistic and ahistorical her assumptions vis a vis the genius of Rearden, Galt, Wyatt, etc, are then look at how Charles Martin Hall and Paul Heroult both figured out how to electrolytically refine aluminum in 1886, or Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce almost simultaneously inventing the integrated circuit in 1986 or Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller and Stanislaus Ulam independently arriving at the design for the hydrogen bomb. There are other examples out there as well, but Rand chooses to ignore all of them, her heroes and their inventions spring forth like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, which allows her to conveniently ignore, assuming she even considered it in the first place, the inconvenient question of how you can reconcile the enforcement of intellectual property rights via an artificial, government created and enforced monopoly with her worship of the free market and her contempt for businessmen who can’t make it without having the government suppress their competitors.

  229. 229.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Stephen J:

    I remember reading Atlas Shrugged in the mid-’60s and thinking how much it resembled the fractured long-winded pseudo-intellectual nonsense spouted by my A-Head friends, (the term for speed freaks back then), after being on a 3 week sleepless high.

    In his biography My Dark Places, James Ellroy mentions how, when he was a speed freak who got his dose by chewing up benzedrine soaked chunks of cotton from asthma inhalers that he was shoplifting from Los Angeles drugstores, he read Atlas Shrugged and became convinced, briefly, that he was a superman. Then he came down and realized, wisely, that he wasn’t.

  230. 230.

    Viva Brisvegas

    @Wile E. Quixote:

    Isn’t fascistic and anyone who says it is has about as much of a grasp on what fascism is as Jonah Goldberg does.

    Rampant militarism with general disenfranchisment of the civilian population plus doctrinaire adherence to the conservative status quo, may not equate precisely to textbook fascism but it comes close enough.

    Mussolini may not have not built any ovens, but he was still a fascist. He would have had no problems at all with the world of Starship Troopers.

  233. 233.

    MinRkist

    I am not surprised it took this long to make a movie adaptation. I will be compelled to watch but find it hard to believe that Left leaning Hollywood and the press will do the movie any favors. These Ayn Rand ideas are dangerous and must be squashed lest it undoes the current order.

  234. 234.

    The Frito Pundito

    But you know, when this tanks at the box office, the folks at Big Hollywood will find a way to blame it on the liberals/Islamists/commies/Obama.

  235. 235.

    Avedon

    That just reminded me of all the reasons I used to hate it when I’d flip the channel looking for something to watch and they were showing the damned Fountainhead again. I didn’t even know who Ayn Rand was back then and it only took about a minute and a half to know I was watching pure, unmitigated bullshit.

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