It’s not great when you release a movie titled “Part 1″ and there are no other parts on the way.
And then the following weekend, but after that, no more
Who is John Galt? Movie goers could care less.
“Atlas Shrugged” is one of the greatest selling novels of all time, or, according to William Buckley, the greatest selling novel of all time. But unlike “The Da Vinci Code,” reader enthusiasm did not translate to box-office gold.
The film has grossed a measly $2.5 million and will be removed from theaters shortly. Critics demolished the film, branding it a piece of poorly filmed propagandistic hogwash. The film earned a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The putative audience for an Ayn Rand film is quite obvious: tea partiers. Spooked by national spending on entitlement programs and stimulus, and disoriented by the election of a black president, small groups of white, fly-over state Americans bandied together around a grassroots message: stop government spending.
The timing for this message couldn’t have been worse. Without government spending in 2008 throughout 2009, the United States would have fallen into a depression. It would have been deeper than the recession precipitated by the banking crisis, which was caused by money-making plans such as credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Rand surely would have held the men who invented these financial products in high regard.
In 2009, book sales spiked for “Atlas Shrugged,” a 1,000-page tome that explains a social ideology called objectivism through a host of morally elastic, secular characters. The great American value of aiding those who are the worst off is not held in high regard by these objectivists, and neither by the tea party.
The tea party’s current champion is Congressman Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan is very famous because of a budget plan he recently presented. It simply required that the federal government spend less money on the elderly. Obama blasted him for it, and Ryan has since become the president’s foil.
Paul Ryan has said the main reason he became interested in politics and decided to run for office is because of Ayn Rand’s inspiring message, that no man should allow another to live off his back.
Only those interested in a type of literary self-flagellation can actually make it through the entirety of the densely worded “Atlas Shrugged.” So why not see the movie, if its message is so important?
Producers release movies starring comic-book characters because there is a huge audience for it. With the tea party rise it seemed now, more than ever, there was an audience for a bona fide Ayn Rand film. What happened?
Aside from the election of a few Congressman like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and the now-silent Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party might not exist. The ideological strain we’re told so much about might have been a few pissed off folks at very particular point in time plus underhanded brainwashing by the Koch Brothers.
Try as they might, the process of voting is a free market as well. And thank god for that.
April 28, 2011 at 1:44 am, Goneflukin03 said:
Another terrible article from the racist writers at D&T
April 28, 2011 at 2:30 am, 99iancarter99 said:
What a carp review, Atlas Shrugged though written over 50 year ago is an accurate statement on what is wrong by big government and is occuring in the US today.
April 28, 2011 at 3:40 am, Bob Flynn said:
“…the banking crisis … was caused by money-making plans such as credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations”
That is so utterly wrong-headed that I shudder at how to bridge the chasm between that statement and the truth.
Suffice to say that it completely ignores that fact that the government:
a. provided a market buyer for bad debt (Freddie & Fannie)
b. removed the downside of risk-taking via the policy of Too-Big-To-Fail
c. Removed the risk of customer’s losing their savings via FDIC.
d. Told banks that if they didn’t make risky loans, they couldn’t expand their business (Community Reinvestment Act)
The government has been on a “promote home-ownership” tirade for over a decade, and the housing bubble was a direct result.
Your statement that the banking crisis was simply a result of some new financial products fails to penetrate even the surface of a complex economic-political phenomenon.
April 28, 2011 at 4:07 pm, Milton Freenagle said:
The movie is a good, perhaps very good, rendition of Ayn Rand’s masterpiece. Part of the reason it hasn’t found its audience is trashy reviews like this one.
April 28, 2011 at 10:07 pm, Mccormac_tim said:
Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies From”Dune”
April 30, 2011 at 2:06 pm, AVZ said:
I liked the movie. I had not heard of it until someone brought to my attention. This was the first review I ever saw for Atlas Shrugged.
May 14, 2011 at 5:37 am, Stephenkg said:
Two inconvinient facts for Mr. Blackwell. This is not Ayn Rand’s movie as she died nearly 30 years ago. The free market overwhelmingly supports Ayn Rand’s novel. Mr. Blackwell, you are an idiot!
May 22, 2011 at 5:01 am, Michael said:
Interesting reasoning: Since Rand’s books have been spectacular successes, clearly the market supports Ayn Rand. In any case, she rejected Philistine commercialism with contempt. One of her most negative characters, Peter Keating in “The Fountainhead,” practices it avidly – and comes to ruin.