Hmm. It seems Angelina Jolie has signed on to the film version of Atlas Shrugged.
I’ve read Atlas Shrugged. Twice. (Shut up. I was nineteen. I outgrew it.) The plot: Socialists and collectivists are evil and hamper the truly brilliant in their efforts to make money, which would somehow benefit us all. John Galt, the epitome of all human virtue, convinces the best and brightest people in the country to go into hiding so that society collapses under the weight of its own bureaucratic incompetence. The plot sort of grinds down as the society does, so I imagine the screenplay will need some punching up.
There are lots of things to hate about the book, so I’ll present them as a Top Ten list.
10. No one would ever say “Oh, who is John Galt?” in frustration.
9. The pace is glacial.
8. Like any good demagogue, Rand scorns university education. One young metallurgist approaches Hank Rearden and says something like “Can I work with you? I have a degree from university — I know it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on…” All the education you need comes from the School of Hard Knocks!
7. If anyone ever has any altruistic motives in the book, they’re portrayed as craven weaklings.
6. Ayn Rand disses soy! How could she?
5. The love scenes are excruciating. I seem to remember one between Dagny and Hank where Hank gives her kisses that leave a ‘trail of bruises’. What?
4. John Galt’s climactic speech is Sixty. Pages. Long.
3. In the book, the rich are the only ones who produce anything useful; that’s why they’re rich.
2. There were hardly any environmentalists in 1957 when the book was published, but Rand finds an opportunity to bag them. “They’re just the kind of people I hate,” says noble Dagny.
1. Printing 1,100 pages of “Greed is good” over and over again would have been cheaper and easier, and only slightly less tedious than the actual plot.
So if the film adaptation is any good, it will provide even more philosophical justification to ignore those ignoble souls who just can’t make it in this world and shouldn’t exist. Also there will be more Objectivists on the net. Listening to music by Rush. Just what we need.
On the other hand, it’s going to be a three-parter, so perhaps the first one will be sufficiently grim that the rest won’t get made.
6 October 2006 at 9:02 am
Sounds like a barrel of laughs; very uplifting!
Soy is great and so are environmentalists… I hate people.
6 October 2006 at 9:04 am
What about people made of soy?
6 October 2006 at 11:42 am
mmmm… soy people….
8 October 2006 at 5:51 pm
Maybe if we mix the two we will have Soy…lent green. And as we all know social darwinists would have no problem with that. A whole new twist to “let them eat cake”.
8 October 2006 at 11:16 pm
Don’t tell me the ending — I haven’t seen it yet.
You used to have a copy of ‘Make Room! Make Room!’ when we were younger, if I remember correctly.
9 October 2006 at 9:43 pm
Still do. Not the same one. I never did read the Rand chronicals. Found out what they were about and then the task just seemed too daunting. I just didn’t want to read that many pages of an idea I don’t agree with. Was I wrong? and what is Ms. Jolie doing in that movie? She seem more the socialist type of late.
4 December 2007 at 5:43 am
ok, so if you read the book twice, please tell me you at least see how wrong Angelina and Brad are for roles in that movie. Rand was a proponent of the virtue of selfishness, but I don’t think she saw big lips and a strong jaw as values in and of themselves, unless she was looking for eye candy, like her husband, who was never included in a book…or in her marriage for that matter.