![]() ![]() Because as we’ve seen, deregulation has worked so beautifully. Still, in the year where Inside Job snagged the Oscar, it takes massive planet-sized balls to release a film where the heroes are corporate giants who just want the nasty government to leave them alone so they can make money. But most of the credit goes to Ayn Rand, who didn’t write characters so much as one-note ciphers there to represent the A’s and B’s of her political ramblings. It’s an impressive feat for first time director Paul Johansson, himself an actor (he played Bolt in Soapdish), to force his cast to stifle anything resembling feelings like a new boyfriend with a Sunday morning pew fart. Which is not to disparage the actors - character actors like Michael Lerner, Jon Polito, and Graham Beckel - we’ve seen most of them in quality pictures and know they are capable of being passionate and hilarious. No, this film could have been performed by artist’s mannequins, with projections of actor headshots on them and still given the same wooden and emotionless performances. Only that might actually imply there was drama. It’s like the dramatization of an SAT math problem, or a first year economics final essay. ![]() ![]() For a movie that has been almost forty fucking years in the making, that at one point allegedly had a cast of luminaries attached that would make any studio salivate, that’s based on a novel that seen a renaissance thanks to the backassward ramblings of the Teabaggers and the Fox News ilk, it’s remarkable how bad it actually is. I’d call it vanilla, but vanilla actually has a flavor. I know going in, it’s a fruitless endeavor - like Emily Dickinson wrote, “Haters gonna hate.” But regardless of whether you feel that America is a welfare state bleeding the rich to slake the slavering laggard poor, or that no matter if it’s a jackass or an elephant it’s still kicking the faces of the little man in order to support big business, I think we can all agree on one simple beautiful thing: Atlas Shrugged: Part I is a terrible fucking movie. You’re not interested in my dimestore second-hand interpretation of the Puritanical Gordon Gekko crackpot movement Ayn Rand hatched called Objectivism, but by virtue of her infusing her novel Atlas Shrugged with it I need to delve somewhat. It can’t possibly be because the final product is actually inferior. Conservatives and Christians are so fucking paranoid as to their own personal worldviews that anyone disparaging a product in line with their own ideologies are trashing it solely because they harbor a bias. You’ve already made up your minds on what your thoughts are on the film and of Ayn Rand. What I’m about to tell you doesn’t matter. ![]()
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