image source: http://www.cascadepolicy.org/liberty/ayn_rand.jpg
Posted on 02/02/2005 10:51:31 AM PST by Borges
Well said.
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Anyone see that movie made about her ...'The Passion of Ayn Rand'? Helen Mirren played Rand. It premiered at Sundance 6 years ago but never got theaterical distribution.
| Some web pages which include mentions of Ayn Rand and/or her books |
She escaped from tyranny. She broke ranks with organized religion. She organized a small group into a tightly-knit organization with her in charge. Millions have been inspired by her life story. She would have just turned 100 this past week.
But enough about Maria Von Trapp...
Well, I liked it, and it was considered a box-office success at the time:
"...helped place Vidor once more in the front rank of Hollywood directors. His film The Fountainhead (1949) only solidified his reputation as a stylist, with its audacious (and stunning) visual content and a drama that walked a fine line between the fiercely sexual and the coldly intellectual; like most of Vidor's best movies, it has improved with age. Alas, it was to be the director's last major triumph..." -- from http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800036162&cf=biog&intl=us
that IS NOT funny! :-) You shared the skit outta me!
Vidor's direction isn't the problem, it's Rand's absolute refusal to adapt her words to the screen, plus her insistance on Cooper as leading man. It's her 'Ed Wood' moment:Long treasured as a masterpiece of camp ... One of the most unusual artifacts ever to emerge from Hollywood, Ayn Rand's adaptation of her novel is a contradictory hodgepodge of sub-Nietzschean musing, so laden with wooden rhetoric and hysterical ranting that it could never be mistaken for any speech ever uttered on this planet. The bizarre miscasting of Cooper as an arrogant Ubermann and Patricia Neal as a mildly sadomasochistic intellectual only add to the fun. In the legendary scene in which Dominique watches Roark pound his pneumatic drill into the quarry rockface, there's no mistaking the beatific look on her face for intellectual excitement.
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1800067280&cf=info&intl=us
James Woods and Heather Locklear are more like it.
I get the drift. But some of my circles of friends also get turned on by deliberately stilted intellectualisms, others by tongue-in-cheek subdued melodrama. There must have been enough of such non-regular people to make the admittedly unorthodox (and yes, "WEIRD") style a money-maker.
| Rand-O-Rama: Ayn Rand’s long shelf life in American culture [a few of the ways her presence has been felt and references keep getting made] “This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.…Nothing she has to say is said in a second-rate fashion. You have to think of The Magic Mountain…when you think of The Fountainhead.” —Lorine Pruette, The New York Times Book Review (1943) Whittaker Chambers [who it turned out, NEVER read the book] totally panned Atlas Shrugged, scathing and hateful in its intensity, in National Review (1957). “Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. [The New York Times reviewer] suspiciously wonders ‘about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work.’ This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.” —Alan Greenspan, future chairman of the Federal Reserve, responding to a negative review of Atlas Shrugged, in The New York Times (1957) “It’s all great, Hef! Except…do you really think our readers will dig a nude fold-out of Ayn Rand?” —“Hefner and His Pals,” a comic strip in Mad magazine (1967) “Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect...and his love life….I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed.” —Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review (1968) “He spent several days deciding on the artifacts [that would be found with his dead body]....He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by his scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card.” —Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977) “With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand” —liner notes to the Rush album 2112 (1976)
“Lots of girls fell in love with Definitism because of the erotic power of the books. No one wanted to admit how important the sex was, but let’s face it—the books were very erotic. There were all these intrigues going on, all these little girls wanting to satisfy their sexual cravings.” —Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)
“Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again.” —police officer Barbrady, South Park (1998) “However completely you think you preside over your own schedule, there are inflexibilities there. Inflexibilities which not even one of Ayn Rand’s heroes could do very much about.” —William F. Buckley Jr., Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (2004) “Unlike…any other Marvel [Comics] author, [Spider-Man co-creator Steve] Ditko received plotting credit as early as Amazing Spider-Man #25 (1965), an unprecedented concession that was most likely the result of Ditko’s contemporaneous discovery of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, with its hatred of creative dilution and unearned rewards.” —Andrew Hultkrans in Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers!: Writers on Comics (2004) “The Incredibles…suggests a thorough, feverish immersion in both the history of American comic books and the philosophy of Ayn Rand.…Luckily, though, [writer and director Brad] Bird’s disdain for mediocrity is not simply ventriloquized through his characters, but is manifest in his meticulous, fiercely coherent approach to animation.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2004) -- from Reason, March 2005 |
echo that! LOL
Been a fan of Rand for decades - Have most of her books - and the movie "Fountainhead" (would love to find or found a "Galt's Gulch" (;o)) ;
One of her best books: "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal." She had a brilliant mind -
However, she was a long-legged, beautiful blond, trapped in a short, dumpy, pudgy, dark haired, plain faced body. (the painting was SO over flattering). She ruled her weak artist husband like a Mama T - had no children, abortion was handy and espoused by her and adultery was practiced with no qualms.
Truly a complex person: hard line pro-choice (before the phrase was coined) liberal on one side and adamant conservative capitalist on the other. Makes for a clash within...
I think you captured the essence there.
BTTT !!
which is kind of strange considering John Galt's speech in which he said, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, "Happiness is a lack of contradiction in one's values."
I think happiness actually involves having so well integrated a sense of values that you can be totally relaxed about your inner self. This is the opposite of the tense self-control which Rand and many of her followers seemed to exhibit. I'm afraid one of the least common personality types (much to my own personal dismay) would be a "humorous, easy-going, SPONTANEOUS Ayn Rand fan" (if you know any of the female persuasion, LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY!)!!!
I always thought Hanks could play Galt.
or Sharon Stone
I believe both Hanks and Stone are LLLs (looney liberal leftists). If that's true (and I'm pretty sure it is) I would NOT want them doing any promotion of the movie or being held up as exponents of any of its ideas. Both Woods and Locklear are Republicans and capable of standing up for their ideas. Woods was on Donny Deutsch last night yelling, "Rudy in '08!", and Locklear has spoken at some GOP functions in Thousand Oaks or thereabouts.
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