Trailer.

From here.

K

Man, that has the stench of daytime soap all over it (and part 1 of 4!). Fountainhead was pretty bad, but at least it was funnier:

At least Steve Ditko will have something to watch at the movies. I was once required to read Atlas Shrugged for a Lit class in High School and if memory serves me it wasn't that bad a book. However, I don't remember it being so soap opera like.

Sold!

Looks like shit.

Still Looks like shit.

Looks alright now.

Oh, wait... Yeah, still looks like shit.

I thought the book was at least ok. That movie looks like a steaming pile.

Picked up the DVD yesterday. I hadn't yet read the book when I saw it in the theater back in April, so initially I didn't think it was too bad, most likely because they crammed about 400 page of material into 90 minutes, so there was a lot to take in. Watching it a second time (and knowing what's coming next), the acting is often pretty hammy, and the production values are kinda cheap. The music is pretty great, though. I'm normally not a fan of that Spielberg-esque "tell me what I'm supposed to feel" style of musical scoring, but here it worked. Biggest complaint, they showed Galt over and over.

I only spot-listened to the commentary track, which was recorded in August. Interesting that they could only get the two producers and the screenwriter to participate. Not even Paul Johansson (the director) was there, and he even played Galt. They didn't seem to have much to say about the movie production, instead spending most of their conversation talking about how Ayn Rand has been wrongfully classified as a rightwing ideologue. They also said that pre-production for Part II should begin by the end of this year; and that Part II will include D'Anconia's "money is the root of all good" speech.

Ah ha ha ha! Hang on to that DVD, Allen. It's solid plastic irony now.

http://blog.atlasshruggedmovie.com/2011/11/atlas-shrugged-inadvertently-releases.html

Huh. Well how about that.

The back-cover synopsis goes:

"AYN RAND"S timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life for a new millennium. The year is 2016 and America is on the verge of economic disaster. The greatest citizens are being targeted and dark forces are working to bring about America's final days. Our only hope for salvation lies with Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden, rugged individualists whose bold ideas may have the power to spark a revolution and reclaim the American Dream."

Obviously the "self-sacrifice" bit is outright contradictory to the gist of the source material, but the whole blurb is very sloppily conceived.

Oh, and I should add, Wal-Mart didn't have this. Best Buy only had one copy of the DVD (and no BluRay). It wasn't in the New Release section, no one in the store even knew they had it (much less what category it was supposed to be in), and the case had been turned around on the shelf with the name hidden.

The Free Market speaks.

I bet you thought the October surprise was going to be the confirmation of Bain Capital's history of tax evasion, Mitt Romney being brought up on charges. Nope! It's Atlas Shrugged Part 2 in theaters 10/12.

I wonder if Part 2 is going to be as lame or if they'll tap into the glorious weirdness of The Fountainhead. That movie was like looking at the world through the eyes of a crazy person.

Mike

I just heard about it yesterday, so I don't know much about it yet. The biggest point of interest thus far is the complete re-cast of the principal players. Apparently, the producers were either too cheap or too stupid to retain the original cast for the sequels THEY HAD PLANNED FROM THE BEGINNING, and for whatever reasons (the pitiful box office return and the critical savaging AS1 took, probably chief among them) those folks chose not to return. This new cast is noticeably older, with even less impressive filmographies. The joke is that part 3 will get re-cast again.

Interesting that they're shooting for a pre-election release. If it plays near me, I'll go see it.

A commercial for AS2 yesterday said "in theaters everywhere." Hard to believe this one is going to get more screens than the first one.

I went with a group of people to see Seven Psychopaths but couldn't talk anybody into sticking around for Atlas Shrugged. So I watched it alone. Of the other twelve people in the theater, there were four other loner guys. In the four couples, all the men were hunched over to their women whispering explanations through the whole movie and they weren't interested at all in the trailers.

The movie was about as bad as I expected. CGI for the train wreck and the airplane chase was some of the worst stuff I've ever seen that wasn't on SyFy. Score pieces get recycled many times. The set for the accident at the steel mill looked like something from a sitcom. Several transitions were done with very cheap looking swipe-fades. Supposedly this time they had a fifty percent BIGGER budget! I'm guessing a lot of that must have gone to distribution since AS2 is playing at five theaters near me, as opposed to AS1 only playing at one theater on the other side of town. Also, TV commercials.

The run time was under two hours, so the extra-talky second act got seriously compressed. The Ayn Rand strawmen were even more ridiculous and cartoony than in the first movie. Francisco's "money is the root of all good" speech clocked under a minute-and-a-half.

The actress playing Dagny this time is older and fatter. Every re-casted actor was even less of what might have been derived from the book than any of the original cast. Many notable has-beens here and there. I felt especially sorry for Diedrich Bader, Michael Gross and Patricia Tallman. Teller (of Penn &...) has a small speaking(!) role. Sean Hannity and some other Fox News douchebags show up, too.

Down to one theater this week.

And now it is GONE.

The moviegoing public shrugged.

The budget numbers have been adjusted for the first movie since I last looked at it a week or so ago. Now it says the first movie had a budget of $20M and the second $10M. Formerly it said the first one had a budget of $6M.

Box office for the first one is reported as $4.5M, I don't know whether that includes DVD sales and rentals. Box office for part II is $2.8M.

I don't know how the third one will get made with a $22.7M cumulative loss.

American exceptionalism, the power of private enterprise, and the invisible hand of the free market.

Heh.

Seriously though, you'll notice they had to get an entirely new director, screenwriter, and cast for the second one. The stink of failure was on this franchise from the first film. But Aglialoro has been trying to get the movie made for decades... it's an ideological quest for him.

Then Agli's stinking "quest" failed miserably. Ditko was nuts for even reading that garbage in the first place. And don't worry - little old two-faced Annie Randy cashed her SS check from the gubmint money store every month just like everybody else, folks.

I've been thinking about how great a Mr. A movie would be if if kept him an unrelenting Randian absolutist but had ever other character behave like normal people. It would start out like a super-hero flick and then gradually morph into something closer to a horror movie.

Mike

From the BBC In Search of Steve Ditko: "Watchmen writer Alan Moore has related a story about an acquaintance who said he asked Ditko about whether he was familiar with Rorschach. Reportedly, Ditko acknowledged, describing Rorschach as being 'like Mr. A except insane'."