Posted on 03/25/2011 6:57:20 AM PDT by blog.Eyeblast.tv
On March 23rd we went to the Atlas Shrugged movie premiere at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Afterward we were able to catch up with producer Harmon Kaslow and several people who attended the premiere. Here is what they had to say about the movie.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.eyeblast.tv ...
Did they leave the sexy sex in?
bttt
The romance was the crappiest part of the book. I skipped every bit of it.
Agreed!
It’s not playing in my area.
It opens 4/15
Rand seems to have despised social conservatives, Christianity and the idea of charity--her most positive contribution, imho, is her ability to illustrate the positive effects of a capitalist economic system, the celebration of human creativity, and the dangers of an overbearing government.
A theologian she ain't. :)
Thanks...
No, she believed in Charity, just not Altruism:
"Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute is self-sacrifice–which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial self-destruction–which means the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good." - Ayn Rand, Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World
I noticed that there’s only about a dozen cities where the film is going to open. Unfortunately, Kansas City is not one of them. Does anybody know if there is going to be a general release of the movie for the “smaller” locales? It’s not even going to be playing in St. Louis. The closest to me is Dallas or Denver.
Thanks for the quote...I had not seen that before.
Her academic discussions may have indicated such a distinction, but it seems the way her philosophy is carried out does not...that is to say, “in real life”, there didn’t seem to be a distinction.
She scoffed at people, for instance, who were leaders in the conservative movement, who believed in God. Not a very charitable attitude, was it?
Don’t get me wrong: I do think she had a positive contribution, just not in the arena of loving your fellow man as it is understood by most people. :)
Ping
I may actually go see this movie in the theater, rather than waiting for the DVD.
I rarely go to the movie theaters: It’s not that I have any issues with the theaters (though I have no interest in most movies coming out these days), but the experience is just too “painful” for me... I have really bad arthritis, and get massively stiff and sore sitting for 2 hours, and the last time I went (Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Pt1), I had a lot of trouble standing up after the movie ended.
Mark
“that is to say, ‘in real life’ there didn’t seem to be a distinction.”
What “real life”? Are there any real life objectivists? Thyere was her and her cabal. And, yes, maybe she was a, how shall I put it?, odd, or even a bad person. But too many famous novelists and/or philosophers have been horrible, horrible people to count.
As for her fans, that is the sort of people you’d expect, to whatever degree, to carry out her message in real life, they pretty much span the rainbow of human types. Though many of them are jerks shortly after reading her, they eventually revert to what they were beforehand, with a few additional ideological quirks.
The love scenes in Atlas Shrugged were the strangest ones I’ve ever read. Makes me wonder about the nature of Ayn Rand’s love life.
They had an almost clinical quality about them.
“The romance was the crappiest part of the book. I skipped every bit of it”
Ditto. Boring. Poorly written. Breathless and juvenile. Poorly integrated into the story. Largely irrelevant to the book.
“Makes me wonder about the nature of Ayn Rand’s love life.”
It’s pretty well known that Ayn had a very strange sex life. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ...
You should check out a very interesting flick called "The Passion of Ayn Rand" based on the Barbara Branden's book about Rand's affair with Nathaniel Branden. It is a riveting performance by Helen Mirren in the title role.
Not a very flattering portrayal, but having devoured everything Rand ever wrote in my youth, I found it quite compelling. Peter Fonda plays Rand's husband Frank O'Connor.
There were two things I didn’t agree with Ayn about, God and womens rights. While she professed individualism she also advocated special rights for women. I think her Russian background brought the God issue into play. God, to many people, is simply something greater than man. She saw even that basic belief as something useless, that man was in control of his own life so nothing else mattered.
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