Atlas Shrugged Part 2: The Strike, Part 3
Jun. 25th, 2013 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyYou know what? I'm not going to be productive today anyway, so I'm just going to post the rest of this thing.
Previously on AS:S:
A few hilarious things: Paper newspapers still exist and cost $22, the phrase “economic martial law,” the freeze frame from the sole scene filmed with this actor, the complete cop-out of not putting the year down, and the fact that it’s May Day. Get it? Because socialists.
They focus on this guy for approximately half the movie, so I was hoping he’d turn out to be John Galt, because lol irony. But no, he’s just a homeless guy who is very concerned about the economic policy of America.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 10
Regular workin' folk are very angry about a law that says that they can’t get fired or take pay cuts during a Depression. Very angry!
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 11
This is what the homeless guy was carving. These Tea Party types are so melodramatic. The very worst thing they can imagine happening to America is government ownership of patent rights and zero economic growth.
Another old white guy from the government (I’ve lost track as to whether this is the same one from before) shows up to get Rearden to sign over his patents to the government and, horror of horrors, change the name to “Miracle Metal.” Really? That’s the best you could do, evil totalitarian socialists? Not, “The People’s Metal?” “Glorious Firm Proletarian Steel?”
Anyway, Rearden won’t do it, no way José, so the government guy drops printed photographs (what?) of Rearden and Dagny holding hands and kissing, and suddenly we’re back in the 1950s where a CEO’s reputation would be irreparably ruined (“think of the young girls!”) by the revelation that she was involved with a married man. Actually, I don’t think anyone would have given a shit in the 50s.
Dagny freaks out when she finds out that Rearden signed his patents over, so she ragequits and drives off to her family’s cottage, though not before phoning Rearden and telling him goodbye.
The shot from his end is actually kind of nice. It’s the closest to desolate and apocalyptic the movie gets, with the neon sign and the burning oil cans.
Then he calls his lawyer and demands that he get him a divorce from Lillian. Um, you can just file for no-fault divorce. You know that’s a thing you can do now, right?
There is no chain of command and apparently Dagny runs everything personally and has to be called every time there’s a track repair or stalled engine, so as soon as she’s gone, everything falls apart at Taggart. James promotes Some Guy Named Mitchum from earlier to COO. He’s been at the company eight months. Okily-dokily.
That was the expression I was making during this whole movie.
This scene of Dagny throwing out all the furniture in her cottage is apparently vital to the plot, but I’m not sure how. I was expecting her to burn it or build something quaint out of it, or maybe use it to make the McGuffin run, but no, she just tosses it there and leaves it, because no one needs wooden things during an energy crisis. Hey Dagny, I could use a nice Muskoka chair like that if you don’t want it.
Quentin does more science!
Who else is excited for Breaking Bad to come back?
How many scenes of Quentin doing science do we need, exactly? Apparently, there weren’t enough so they had to include that one, just so that we’re reminded that Quentin is still doing science.
(I am not a scientist but I don't get how transparent whiteboards are always the shorthand for doing science. They strike me as very impractical. Yes, I understand that it means that we get to see the actor's face while he is doing science, but it still bothers me.)
OKAY NEVER MIND WE ARE ALMOST AT THE TRAIN WRECK. I don't know about you, but that's the bit I've been waiting to see.
Some irritating caricatures on a train who are dressed like businessmen and politicians but espouse vaguely socialist beliefs. I WONDER WHERE THIS PLOT IS HEADED. Oh, just keep in mind, when you cheer on their deaths in a few minutes, that this poor waiter is also going to die horribly.
There’s also a Mussolini reference, but it’s terrible and exactly as politically coherent as anything else in the movie. Socialism = fascism, we know.
Yet another odd focus on a minor character. This guy, who happens to look like an Observer from Fringe but with less emotional range, at least gets to be sarcastic. There’s a suggestion that he’s sabotaged the engine, but since he appears to die in the collision, maybe not.
Ah, so the train’s thingamabob is broken and the whatsit’s stalled, and the politician guy calls up Taggart in the middle of the night and orders him to personally do something about it, and the chain of events here just seem so unlikely and I’m annoyed that they’re making the one potentially exciting part of this movie so boring.
Mitchum & Co. pull some magic and find a coal cart and a retired driver that can tow the train, and get the thing running again. Yay!
Did Ayn Rand write a whole book about railroads without knowing anything about railroads? I think so. I know nothing about railroads but this doesn’t seem like a thing that would happen in the real world.
For no reason I can fathom, we switch genres to a disaster movie and the train starts smoking, even though it hasn’t hit anything yet, loses power (didn’t it already? Isn’t it just being towed? I’m so confuuuuused!) and the emergency power comes on, and then some random disaster-movie ditz pulls the emergency brake, because you can do that on a train I guess. But what she doesn’t know is that there’s an army train headed directly for them!
Incidentally, when I was watching this, being shitfaced drunk, I thought that the blond woman was Dagny for awhile, and was quite confused.
This was the only other shot that I liked, though you have to admit it doesn’t quite fit with the colour scheme or ambience of the rest of the movie. But it’s hella steampunk.
OH THANK FUCK I THOUGHT THESE TRAINS WERE NEVER GOING TO COLLIDE.
It's time for a happy gif parade.
Finally!
See what happens when capitalists go on vacation? Do you see?
Everything explodes.
Literally the only thing that is stopping trains from exploding all the time is that capitalists never go on vacation, even for a day. This is the moral lesson you are expected to take from this movie.
This scene has a horrible continuity thing where, in one shot, Dagny has a power drill and is drilling her front porch, and then Francisco shows up, and then suddenly she has a glass of wine in her hand instead of a power drill. Which she doesn’t drink. The wine, that is. It would be weird if she drank the power drill, but honestly, in this movie, it seems more likely than actual alcohol getting drunk.
I wonder if Francisco’s character is supposed to be an allegory for Jesus, with the ability to transform power drills into wine, but it might just be that I’ve been watching this terrible movie for too long.
Their little picnic is interrupted by the ZOMG a gazillion people just died on your railroad call. Oh, and once again, Francisco appears in the same scene as a catastrophic accident that threatens to bankrupt a friend’s company. I haven’t read the book; is he actually behind it?
Cut to Mitchum bringing the “Who is John Galt?” count up to 12, because it’s totally a thing that you’d say when you’ve just witnessed/bore some responsibility for an accident that’s killed hundreds of people. Rather than, “Oh shit.” Then Dagny finds out that all of their “quality” people havebeen murdered and the bodies dumped disappeared.
Hahaha, I’m so amused by the idea of John Galt taking all of Dagny’s subordinates but not her. It’s like a really meanspirited version of Left Behind.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 12
Mouch shows up just so that Dagny can rail on at him about how government interference caused the trains to collide. But he agrees to ignore Directive 10-289 to let her do whatever she has to do to get the trains running again (her plan is currently to run off to Colorado to dig out the collapsed tunnel with a spoon). And she’s going to take the train! But I thought the trains weren’t running.
My head hurts. I need a glass of wine. Which I would actually drink, unlike some characters.
Science!
I’m not sure what science does, beyond lighting up and causing a lot of power lines to spark (it seems to knock out more electricity than it generates), but okay, science.
Galt shows up to kill Quentin obvs., so he calls Dagny and quits, taking the engine with him.
And now Dagny's train is stalled too. These are the worst trains ever. I believe that of the three trains we’ve seen, two have stalled, and they were the ones run by a private corporation with a ruthless COO. The one that didn’t stall was run by the government. I mean, that blew up too, but only because the privately run train crashed into it.
I’m just saying that when your own highly contrived movie contradicts your political philosophy, you might want to rethink both.
In the next exciting sequence, the repairman shows up, and the important thing is his hat, and the fact that workers are grateful to job creators for creating their jobs. But the hat reveals that he worked for the 20th Century Motor Company along with John Galt before he walked off the job because socialism. So Dagny runs off in his truck—which, as a Good Worker, he acknowledges that belongs to her anyway—and runs off to find Quentin. Who is leaving town ASAP, and she doesn’t have enough time to drive there before he’ll be gone.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 13
So basically John Galt decided to fuck up the world because he didn’t like his boss. Hahaha. Next time join a union, dipshit.
Dagny finds an antique airplane in a hanger and buys it.
So what is fuelling the plane? At $40/gallon, how much did it cost to fuel the plane? And does Dagny even know how to fly?
Also, never mind about the collapsed tunnel and getting the trains to run on time, we have an exciting plane chase to film.
Dagny chases Quentin’s plane into a CGI and then rams her airplane straight up Galt’s Gulch.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 14
Oh, I guess Dagny doesn’t know how to fly a plane after all.
And then. At long last. Her arm broken, her face slightly bloodied so as not to mar her good looks, her hair slightly askew, our heroine crawls from the wreckage of her plane towards daylight. A man’s silhouette lopes towards her. He talks to her. His voice is familiar. He reaches out his hand and tells her that he’s been waiting for her. We finally have the answer to the question I didn’t give enough of a shit to ask.
So! After all of the striding through lobbies, business meetings, car drives, and budget-but-tasteful parties, the film reveals…
WHAT WE STILL DON’T GET TO SEE HIS FACE?
I FEEL CHEATED AND WANT MY MONEY BACK EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T PAY ANY MONEY TO WATCH THIS BECAUSE I TORRENTED IT OFF THE INTERNET LIKE THE REVERSE ROBIN-HOOD PIRATE WHO DOESN’T EVEN GET MENTIONED IN THIS MOVIE WOULD DO. THEY AT LEAST OWE ME COMPENSATION FOR PAIN AND SUFFERING AFTER SITTING THROUGH THIS COLOSSAL PILE OF DRECK. TWICE, BECAUSE I HAD TO GET ALL THE SCREEN SHOTS.
Fuck John Galt in his motherfucking gulch. Holy fuckballs this is the most terrible movie ever made.
I'm feeling a bit ragey at the moment. Please send kittens. Lots of kittens. Bring ‘em in the comments. You know what to do. And someone get me a drink, stat. I’m going to drink it and then I’m going to drink all of the drinks that the actors didn’t drink in this movie. In fact, for every drink that they were holding but didn't drink, I'm going to drink two. So there.
Hey guys? Guys? I can't wait until the last movie, which will be 99.9% John Galt's radio address played over a montage of business people having meetings and looking purposeful.
Previously on AS:S:
A few hilarious things: Paper newspapers still exist and cost $22, the phrase “economic martial law,” the freeze frame from the sole scene filmed with this actor, the complete cop-out of not putting the year down, and the fact that it’s May Day. Get it? Because socialists.
They focus on this guy for approximately half the movie, so I was hoping he’d turn out to be John Galt, because lol irony. But no, he’s just a homeless guy who is very concerned about the economic policy of America.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 10
Regular workin' folk are very angry about a law that says that they can’t get fired or take pay cuts during a Depression. Very angry!
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 11
This is what the homeless guy was carving. These Tea Party types are so melodramatic. The very worst thing they can imagine happening to America is government ownership of patent rights and zero economic growth.
Another old white guy from the government (I’ve lost track as to whether this is the same one from before) shows up to get Rearden to sign over his patents to the government and, horror of horrors, change the name to “Miracle Metal.” Really? That’s the best you could do, evil totalitarian socialists? Not, “The People’s Metal?” “Glorious Firm Proletarian Steel?”
Anyway, Rearden won’t do it, no way José, so the government guy drops printed photographs (what?) of Rearden and Dagny holding hands and kissing, and suddenly we’re back in the 1950s where a CEO’s reputation would be irreparably ruined (“think of the young girls!”) by the revelation that she was involved with a married man. Actually, I don’t think anyone would have given a shit in the 50s.
Dagny freaks out when she finds out that Rearden signed his patents over, so she ragequits and drives off to her family’s cottage, though not before phoning Rearden and telling him goodbye.
The shot from his end is actually kind of nice. It’s the closest to desolate and apocalyptic the movie gets, with the neon sign and the burning oil cans.
Then he calls his lawyer and demands that he get him a divorce from Lillian. Um, you can just file for no-fault divorce. You know that’s a thing you can do now, right?
There is no chain of command and apparently Dagny runs everything personally and has to be called every time there’s a track repair or stalled engine, so as soon as she’s gone, everything falls apart at Taggart. James promotes Some Guy Named Mitchum from earlier to COO. He’s been at the company eight months. Okily-dokily.
That was the expression I was making during this whole movie.
This scene of Dagny throwing out all the furniture in her cottage is apparently vital to the plot, but I’m not sure how. I was expecting her to burn it or build something quaint out of it, or maybe use it to make the McGuffin run, but no, she just tosses it there and leaves it, because no one needs wooden things during an energy crisis. Hey Dagny, I could use a nice Muskoka chair like that if you don’t want it.
Quentin does more science!
Who else is excited for Breaking Bad to come back?
How many scenes of Quentin doing science do we need, exactly? Apparently, there weren’t enough so they had to include that one, just so that we’re reminded that Quentin is still doing science.
(I am not a scientist but I don't get how transparent whiteboards are always the shorthand for doing science. They strike me as very impractical. Yes, I understand that it means that we get to see the actor's face while he is doing science, but it still bothers me.)
OKAY NEVER MIND WE ARE ALMOST AT THE TRAIN WRECK. I don't know about you, but that's the bit I've been waiting to see.
Some irritating caricatures on a train who are dressed like businessmen and politicians but espouse vaguely socialist beliefs. I WONDER WHERE THIS PLOT IS HEADED. Oh, just keep in mind, when you cheer on their deaths in a few minutes, that this poor waiter is also going to die horribly.
There’s also a Mussolini reference, but it’s terrible and exactly as politically coherent as anything else in the movie. Socialism = fascism, we know.
Yet another odd focus on a minor character. This guy, who happens to look like an Observer from Fringe but with less emotional range, at least gets to be sarcastic. There’s a suggestion that he’s sabotaged the engine, but since he appears to die in the collision, maybe not.
Ah, so the train’s thingamabob is broken and the whatsit’s stalled, and the politician guy calls up Taggart in the middle of the night and orders him to personally do something about it, and the chain of events here just seem so unlikely and I’m annoyed that they’re making the one potentially exciting part of this movie so boring.
Mitchum & Co. pull some magic and find a coal cart and a retired driver that can tow the train, and get the thing running again. Yay!
Did Ayn Rand write a whole book about railroads without knowing anything about railroads? I think so. I know nothing about railroads but this doesn’t seem like a thing that would happen in the real world.
For no reason I can fathom, we switch genres to a disaster movie and the train starts smoking, even though it hasn’t hit anything yet, loses power (didn’t it already? Isn’t it just being towed? I’m so confuuuuused!) and the emergency power comes on, and then some random disaster-movie ditz pulls the emergency brake, because you can do that on a train I guess. But what she doesn’t know is that there’s an army train headed directly for them!
Incidentally, when I was watching this, being shitfaced drunk, I thought that the blond woman was Dagny for awhile, and was quite confused.
This was the only other shot that I liked, though you have to admit it doesn’t quite fit with the colour scheme or ambience of the rest of the movie. But it’s hella steampunk.
OH THANK FUCK I THOUGHT THESE TRAINS WERE NEVER GOING TO COLLIDE.
It's time for a happy gif parade.
Finally!
See what happens when capitalists go on vacation? Do you see?
Everything explodes.
Literally the only thing that is stopping trains from exploding all the time is that capitalists never go on vacation, even for a day. This is the moral lesson you are expected to take from this movie.
This scene has a horrible continuity thing where, in one shot, Dagny has a power drill and is drilling her front porch, and then Francisco shows up, and then suddenly she has a glass of wine in her hand instead of a power drill. Which she doesn’t drink. The wine, that is. It would be weird if she drank the power drill, but honestly, in this movie, it seems more likely than actual alcohol getting drunk.
I wonder if Francisco’s character is supposed to be an allegory for Jesus, with the ability to transform power drills into wine, but it might just be that I’ve been watching this terrible movie for too long.
Their little picnic is interrupted by the ZOMG a gazillion people just died on your railroad call. Oh, and once again, Francisco appears in the same scene as a catastrophic accident that threatens to bankrupt a friend’s company. I haven’t read the book; is he actually behind it?
Cut to Mitchum bringing the “Who is John Galt?” count up to 12, because it’s totally a thing that you’d say when you’ve just witnessed/bore some responsibility for an accident that’s killed hundreds of people. Rather than, “Oh shit.” Then Dagny finds out that all of their “quality” people have
Hahaha, I’m so amused by the idea of John Galt taking all of Dagny’s subordinates but not her. It’s like a really meanspirited version of Left Behind.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 12
Mouch shows up just so that Dagny can rail on at him about how government interference caused the trains to collide. But he agrees to ignore Directive 10-289 to let her do whatever she has to do to get the trains running again (her plan is currently to run off to Colorado to dig out the collapsed tunnel with a spoon). And she’s going to take the train! But I thought the trains weren’t running.
My head hurts. I need a glass of wine. Which I would actually drink, unlike some characters.
Science!
I’m not sure what science does, beyond lighting up and causing a lot of power lines to spark (it seems to knock out more electricity than it generates), but okay, science.
Galt shows up to kill Quentin obvs., so he calls Dagny and quits, taking the engine with him.
And now Dagny's train is stalled too. These are the worst trains ever. I believe that of the three trains we’ve seen, two have stalled, and they were the ones run by a private corporation with a ruthless COO. The one that didn’t stall was run by the government. I mean, that blew up too, but only because the privately run train crashed into it.
I’m just saying that when your own highly contrived movie contradicts your political philosophy, you might want to rethink both.
In the next exciting sequence, the repairman shows up, and the important thing is his hat, and the fact that workers are grateful to job creators for creating their jobs. But the hat reveals that he worked for the 20th Century Motor Company along with John Galt before he walked off the job because socialism. So Dagny runs off in his truck—which, as a Good Worker, he acknowledges that belongs to her anyway—and runs off to find Quentin. Who is leaving town ASAP, and she doesn’t have enough time to drive there before he’ll be gone.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 13
So basically John Galt decided to fuck up the world because he didn’t like his boss. Hahaha. Next time join a union, dipshit.
Dagny finds an antique airplane in a hanger and buys it.
So what is fuelling the plane? At $40/gallon, how much did it cost to fuel the plane? And does Dagny even know how to fly?
Also, never mind about the collapsed tunnel and getting the trains to run on time, we have an exciting plane chase to film.
Dagny chases Quentin’s plane into a CGI and then rams her airplane straight up Galt’s Gulch.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 14
Oh, I guess Dagny doesn’t know how to fly a plane after all.
And then. At long last. Her arm broken, her face slightly bloodied so as not to mar her good looks, her hair slightly askew, our heroine crawls from the wreckage of her plane towards daylight. A man’s silhouette lopes towards her. He talks to her. His voice is familiar. He reaches out his hand and tells her that he’s been waiting for her. We finally have the answer to the question I didn’t give enough of a shit to ask.
So! After all of the striding through lobbies, business meetings, car drives, and budget-but-tasteful parties, the film reveals…
WHAT WE STILL DON’T GET TO SEE HIS FACE?
I FEEL CHEATED AND WANT MY MONEY BACK EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T PAY ANY MONEY TO WATCH THIS BECAUSE I TORRENTED IT OFF THE INTERNET LIKE THE REVERSE ROBIN-HOOD PIRATE WHO DOESN’T EVEN GET MENTIONED IN THIS MOVIE WOULD DO. THEY AT LEAST OWE ME COMPENSATION FOR PAIN AND SUFFERING AFTER SITTING THROUGH THIS COLOSSAL PILE OF DRECK. TWICE, BECAUSE I HAD TO GET ALL THE SCREEN SHOTS.
Fuck John Galt in his motherfucking gulch. Holy fuckballs this is the most terrible movie ever made.
I'm feeling a bit ragey at the moment. Please send kittens. Lots of kittens. Bring ‘em in the comments. You know what to do. And someone get me a drink, stat. I’m going to drink it and then I’m going to drink all of the drinks that the actors didn’t drink in this movie. In fact, for every drink that they were holding but didn't drink, I'm going to drink two. So there.
Hey guys? Guys? I can't wait until the last movie, which will be 99.9% John Galt's radio address played over a montage of business people having meetings and looking purposeful.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:31 pm (UTC)For some reason, going to places like Vegas (I haven't been to Vegas, but I've been to Niagara Falls, which is like a little version of Vegas), make me surprisingly pro-capitalism. I loathe the system, but I really like shiny things and want to buy all of the dorky tourist shit and then start lining people up against the wall. It's a fundamental contradiction in my character.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 11:01 pm (UTC)Also, puppy.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 11:03 pm (UTC)Yeah, I get violently anti-capitalist at casinos. I had to go to one once and I thought my head was going to explode.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:25 pm (UTC)I've spent part of the afternoon of my rapidly dwindling life tweeting with actual academics who Made It and I can barely tolerate the jealousy and cognitive dissonance.
My userpic is of some kittens we saw that looked like what we think Zeus and Charlie would have looked like at that age, had we ever seen them. They're even of the right relative size.
Here is a current picture of Zeus the Cat on the Ziggurat of Books. It's where he sleeps nowadays, about nine feet in the air, atop the books which we have not yet finished the place to put. They're all still in boxes.
This stupid system won't tell me how much social capital I have. How will I know how hard to exploit myself?
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:34 pm (UTC)I've spent part of the afternoon of my rapidly dwindling life tweeting with actual academics who Made It and I can barely tolerate the jealousy and cognitive dissonance.
If it makes you feel any better (it probably won't) my experience of which academics Make It and which do not is that it has very little to do with intelligence or innovation. Besides, that's still more productive than what I did today.
This stupid system won't tell me how much social capital I have. How will I know how hard to exploit myself?
Check your profile. Though I think it doesn't appear if you have either too much or too little privacy on.
And cats and books: the best combination.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 01:57 am (UTC)There are though two things that you point out that aren't unrealistic -
Regular workin' folk are very angry about a law that says that they can’t get fired or take pay cuts during a Depression.
That's basically US politics from Reagan's election onward - working class people voting for Republicans to shaft them harder & faster.
Then he calls his lawyer and demands that he get him a divorce from Lillian.
In a no fault divorce, she gets half of everything they own.
If he can get divorced 'cos of her adultery etc. then she would get nothing.
As a Ruthless Capitalist, he has no choice but to sue the pants of her.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:26 am (UTC)If he can get divorced 'cos of her adultery etc. then she would get nothing.
....no. This is not true at all.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:07 am (UTC)That's basically US politics from Reagan's election onward - working class people voting for Republicans to shaft them harder & faster.
Not just US politics. I buy the trend in principle, but I don't buy grubby Occupy-style protesters camped out in front of corporate headquarters protesting a bill by its name. It's an aesthetic problem as much as it's a political problem—it looks like Occupy but sounds like the Tea Party, except when there are anti-capitalist slogans in the frame.
In a no fault divorce, she gets half of everything they own.
If he can get divorced 'cos of her adultery etc. then she would get nothing.
As a Ruthless Capitalist, he has no choice but to sue the pants of her.
The actual line is: "I don't care what it takes; get me out of this." Not sure what he'd be able to sue her for; he's the one cheating and there's photographic evidence.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:52 pm (UTC)Good job that you keep buying him presents to make up for it (like the projector &c.).
To the rest - I didn't grasp the full ridiculousness of the film. I retract my claims that they weren't entirely unrealistic.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:59 pm (UTC)Speaking of which, I'm pretty sure the movie was computer-generated. The dialogue is so far removed from anything an actual person would say that I'm pretty sure they just stuck some Fox News and obviously Ayn Rand's original text into poorly written software and acted out the results.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:14 am (UTC)To follow up you then teh Secretly Canadian type sounds, specifically the astonishing War On Drugs.
Best band I've heard in the last five years and then some
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:08 am (UTC)I don't quite understand how people navigate Twitter with images. Do I have to click on each link to see the kittens?
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 07:47 pm (UTC)Tumblr or Pinterest are much better sites for pics of kitten cuteness.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:35 am (UTC)So basically John Galt decided to fuck up the world because he didn’t like his boss. Hahaha. Next time join a union, dipshit.
lol, win.
also, this is shallow, but Dagny-actress is unattractive and it actually really bothers me.
I know nothing about railroads but this doesn’t seem like a thing that would happen in the real world.
here's the plot in the book (I'm reciting Rand's facts regarding trains, I have absolutely no idea if any are true):
trains are pulled by an engine. Diesel engines are better than coal engines. For one thing, coal engines cannot go through a long tunnel because people asphyxiate on the coal smoke. This train needs to go through a long tunnel but there are no diesels available because the planned-for one broke. Kip Chalmers (politician guy) wants to throw his weight around and have his train not be late, so he pressures James Taggart to get his train going. Taggart sends word down the line and skips out so he can't be blamed for any resulting disaster. The buck gets passed until eventually someone sets up some kid, who obediently orders the coal engine hooked up, which everyone knows will kill everyone on the train when it goes through the tunnel. They find a drunk socialist driver who is totally willing to take the train through because socialists are apparently suicidally dumb. The idea is that everyone in the train company permits this to happen because they don't want to get in trouble for holding up Chalmers' train and they don't care what happens to the people on the train so long as they can't get stuck holding the bag.
In other words: COMMUNISM
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:58 am (UTC)She makes really unpleasant faces, and her eyebrow grooming is an unfortunate choice. At any rate, she's supposed to be completely hot and all three of the major male characters fall for her, and the actress is not hot enough to sell that.
The train thing makes no sense. I don't know about from a technical perspective, but from a human-beings-acting-like-humans perspective, it is really quite strange.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 04:36 am (UTC)Also, the railroad workers aren't threatened with anything beyond Taggart yelling at them a lot.
In the book there is an evil Work Panel thingy and they will destroy your life on a whim. Because communism.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 04:03 pm (UTC)But, it takes time for the smoke to build up, and the train is constantly moving into a small amount of fresh air so the driver would survive, and probably the first car or two - it's people at the back who would asphyxiate as would people in a train that entered shortly afterward 'cos it takes time for the smoke to clear.
Wait. Where's the 90-page speech? And the genocide? And the rape?
Date: 2013-06-26 04:05 am (UTC)[Book spoilers below, but first ...]
Say what you will about Rand's understanding of economics (she had none) or politics (she had none), as a writer, in Atlas Shrugged she did a pretty good, if pulpish, job of depicting a world in slow collapse. By no means great literature, there were still some pretty memorable descriptions of darkness falling over the world, and I imagine it was quite powerful to those who lived through the Great Depression during their formative years.
Also, those women who always longed to meet an actually Superior Man to whom they could surrender themselves probably got their panties pretty damp when Reardon raped Dagny. (I think it was Reardon; might've been Da'conna ...) Pretty sure that was Rand's kink, because her heroine is over-powered by her hero in all three of the books of hers that I've read.
But onwards.
As you can see, I have read Atlas Shrugged and so I can assure you that, yes, "basically John Galt decided to fuck up the world because he didn’t like his boss."
As, towards the end of the book, he explains in a 90-page (30,000 or so word) speech which it appears someone has put online in its entirety, no doubt for your delectation.
The scary thing is that no only did Ayn Rand take that claptrap philosophy seriously, but so did (and do) folks like Alan Greenspan.
Anyway, besides skipping the rape and the speech, the movie seems also to have shied away from presenting the aftermath of the Strike of the Capitalists. In the book, the moochers and leeches slaughter each other when they don't just starve to death. At the end, the Good Guys emerge from Galt's Gulch to find an empty world in which to engage their creative genius.
And Dagny sets out, determined to build a new railroad, unemcumbered by either rules or passengers, to haul Hank Reardon's freight — though to and from where remains an open question, since everybody else is, er, dead.
But you gotta give the lady credit for consistency. To Ayn Rand, the death of 90% of the world's people was without question a Good Thing, a Happy Ending.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 02:01 pm (UTC)I'm guessing it's in the last movie. They're saving all the good stuff.
As a kid, I read We the Living, which I enjoyed despite being creeped out by the main characters. So, you know, I don't doubt that she's capable of competent, if workmanlike, prose. The sort of thing that's quite appealing to 12-year-olds and Alan Greenspan. :) Whatever virtues exist in the novel, however, have been obliterated by the film, which utterly fails to capture any real sense of desperation or danger (other than the danger posed by the protagonists, that is).
There's no real rapey stuff so far—definitely not on the scale of The Fountainhead, which was worse than Deliverance to watch. If I had to comment on the gender dynamics, I'd say that Rearden and Dagny are portrayed pretty equal in terms of power dynamics, and she's even maybe more powerful than Francisco—his thing for her seems one-sided, and no one takes him seriously—but the relationships are all so passionless that one can hardly imagine why anyone bothers.
But you gotta give the lady credit for consistency. To Ayn Rand, the death of 90% of the world's people was without question a Good Thing, a Happy Ending.
Which is always funny to me because, well, who is picking up the trash? (Cue the famous Bob the Angry Flower comic.) I can see why primitivists want mass genocide—I don't agree with them, as I'm quite fond of civilization and humans, but they're at least logically consistent in viewing humans as an invasive animal species that's run out of control and needs to be culled. The people they envision surviving this eco-apocalypse are the ones most capable of surviving it. It's a very crude form of social Darwinism, with the crusty punks emerging on top. But for someone like Rand, who fetishizes wealth and dreams of skyscrapers, the death of 90% of the human population, particularly that 90% whose labour tends to support the lifestyles of 10% she likes, makes no fucking sense at all.
Love your review, by the way.
Ooops!
Date: 2013-06-26 02:51 pm (UTC)Ahem. I saw "Part 3" in your title and my brain (must have) convinced me that was also Part 3 of the (ostensible) film. Also, it seems so thoroughly inept that the "ending" I saw could have been the actual ending of the movie.
Or maybe I just wasn't reading closely enough ...
Which is always funny to me because, well, who is picking up the trash?
Yes, this. For someone always writing about economics, it's amazing how little she understands economics. Which makes Greenspan's love for her all the more bizarre and terrifying. No wonder these people are not even competent.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-27 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-27 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-27 10:43 pm (UTC)I was expecting them to call it "stalin."
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Date: 2013-06-28 03:15 am (UTC)