How do they plan to steal enough tax payer dollars to pay for most of this? How do they plan to PR their way out of needless deaths and maimings of people working in unsafe working conditions? How do they plan to cover up the sexual exploitation of females and children and young lads? How will they convince the majority of us that RWNJ propaganda is not RWNJ propaganda? Shouldn't their "American Cinematic Universe" slogan be: Lying is Truth. Hatred is Strength. Ignorance is Bliss?" UGH.
As someone who spent a lot of time in the Kindly Old Gentleman’s canoe club, I can say with certainty that Rickover was absolutely someone that none of these guys would put up with in their own organizations. Rickover HATED content-free people who thought that titles meant expertise. You know who Rickover liked? Folks like Jimmy Carter. Rickover would have spit on MAGA and used it in his speeches about the collapse of the educational system.
They should have thought about making this before the Fallout TV series came out, because it will just seem like a dull, talky, action-and-satire-free version of Vault Tec. I imagine that episodes 2 and 3 will just be a continuation of John Galt's rant.
Right wing ideologues who think they're creative and original, who can figure them? A film adaptation of ATLAS SHRUGGED has been done and it bombed. A film adaptation of THE FOUNTAINHEAD was done back in 1949, with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and it bombed as well as being panned by critics.
As for the novel ATLAS SHRUGGED, I haven't read any reviews or criticisms of it that examine the, to me, pretty obvious aspect that it uses pulp fiction vigilante tropes and types blatantly lifted from the Spider, the Shadow, and most obviously of all, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. Instead of the Phantom's skull mark or Zorro's sword-slashed Z, the recurring symbol of the mysterious avenger is the super-capitalist's "sign of the dollar." One chapter even has that for its title. Like Doc Savage, the ultimate hero of the novel, John Galt, looks as though he's made of metal - "some dimmed, soft-lustred metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy," instead of bronze, with green eyes that also seem metallic but are "harshly lustrous", and like Doc, he's a super-scientific genius who can invent anything he needs regardless of physical reality, such as a perpetual motion engine. Like Doc he has a team of brilliant aides, each one an absolute master in his particular field. Able to excel at a moment's notice in any field required, too. The CEO of a motor manufacturing company (I assume middle-aged) withdraws from the collectivist world to Galt's hideaway lair in the mountains and becomes the community's lumberjack, just like that and all by himself. No experience needed.
It's kinda telling that this dude classes John Milius with Lucas and Spielberg. Milius is an okay filmmaker, albeit a better writer than director. But he's always been a darling of fascists, because his movies tend to be steeped in jingoism and the idolization of powerful chieftains, usually lawless ones. He's a good enough writer that those choices are appropriate for the material (if not very challenging), but even when it came to mad, monstrous Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the best Milius could summon was a mild rebuke. In Red Dawn, the Cuban commander was so worn down by the Brothers' Godly Patriotism that it broke him.
More to the point, the only people who think of John Milius as a great filmmaker are fascists. And they do. You see it all the time on movie forums. The rest of us? Well, I don't hate Milius as a filmmaker. Even when his fantasies go too far into the deep end and start drowning in the silliness of their premises, he's entertaining. But I'm aware of what he's selling.
Film makers do very often get the novels and stories they bring to the screen, dead wrong. No point fretting about it. Even though I'm a fan of the original Conan stories. But it did jar on me when Conan was bought to be a slave pit fighter and accepted the role. More so when one of his masters asked him, "What is best in life?" and Conan replied with an utterance of Genghis Khan's. Milius seems to be a fan of Genghis Khan's.
Well, Hollywood has made two movies (at least) about the Mongol warlord and conqueror. Both times they made Temujin the hero instead of the villain, once played by John Wayne, once by heart-throb Omar Sharif. Both times the main focus was on Temujin's relationship with Bortai, and neither movie showed him doing what the actual Genghis Khan did, A LOT - destroying entire cities that resisted him and leaving a hillock of severed heads as a warning to others.
But yeah, anybody who admires Genghis Khan is a fascist by me.
There is an argument to be made that certain Hollywood studios have definitely lost the plot, but the answer is not to make more conservative movies, it's to make *better* movies.
The MCU is a good example of an IP that has run its course for now and they are out of ideas. They will never achieve the heights of the past. The fans have moved back to DC universe, and the new Superman movie is quite good, from what I've heard.
Pixar's latest attempt at a big summer blockbuster was a megaflop because the movie script was gutted to remove themes considered too 'woke' (read: gay) and the result was a hollowed out shell of a movie script that made no sense and few people are enjoying. But the K-Pop Demon Hunters from Netflix is the sleeper hit of summer, because they are capitalizing on the popular trends AND managed to tell an interesting story.
Everyone I know is tired of the Disney live action remakes.
The last time I was excited about the movie industry was Barbenheimer two years ago. New stories, great marketing campaigns, and the industry itself encouraging adults to do a classic double feature Saturday with both films and a meal break in between.
Can't they start with The Fountainhead? At least it's possible to READ that book, and the rapey stuff should really appeal to MAGA. Plus, just one movie, not a triptych!
I can see it right now, as if it were opening in Berlin CT: Taylor Schilling and The Jesus Guy play architect and Masters of the World! Cameo by JD Vance as The Loser.
I'm 63 years old. When I was 24 someone gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged to read. After the first chapter I threw it in the garbage where it belonged. It is the only book I have ever thrown away in my entire life.
I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago, probably because I hated myself. Or maybe I should say I “read” it. Because a lot of the process was flipping past page after page after PAGE of mind-numbingly dull speeches by one character or another. And then picking up the thread of the plot again afterwards without a hitch.
So…if they delete the majority of the dialog they might have a movie someone would sit through. But at that point it ain’t gonna be no trilogy.
ETA: Should've read the whole article first, of course Robyn brought those up.
// Then there’s The Greatest Game, a “multi-season, global spy thriller that lays bare China’s plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power by showing their operations and sometimes devastating impact from Kenya to the Atacama desert in northern Chile.” //
I'll bet a dollar that at no point will it say anything about Lonnie's doggy boys destroying American influence and consequently leaving huge openings for China and others to take our place.
I would assume they would just remake “classics” like “Birth of a Nation”, or adaptations of conservative favorites like “The Turner Diaries” or “Mein Kampf”.
I thought The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal (1949) was a pretty good flick. The cinematography alone is worth watching it. It opened to negative reviews when it was released originally, but contemporary critics have given it much higher ratings. Wikipedia says: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 83% based on 12 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. Film critic Emanuel Levy described it as a "highly enjoyable, juicy Freudian melodrama", praising Vidor's technical virtuosity and imagery. Dave Kehr wrote "King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous 'philosophical' novel into one of his finest and most personal films, mainly by pushing the phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek considers it one of his five favorite movies: "ultracapitalist propaganda, but it’s so ridiculous that I cannot but love it.
Now that is right on target. Yes. Dominique Francon is a glaceed, hysterical bitch who hates the world she regards as mediocre and contemptible, and has never felt desire. Until she meets her rapist-hero, of course. But he has to rape her, not seduce her tenderly (she wouldn't respond to that approach anyhow) because she has a sado-masochistic streak a foot wide. (The first time she sees Roark, working in a granite quarry, she fantasises about him as a convict on a chain gang getting whipped.)
She's presented as brilliant, able to do anything and do it well at the first attempt, but she ends up as a mere adjunct to Roark's life, a long way behind his architectural profession. Her last words in the novel, when she's asked who she is, are to answer "Mrs. Roark."
For my money that's coming to a sad end. Rand apparently believed that another character, Katie Halsey, was the one who came to a sad end, because she gets dumped by unprincipled weakling Peter Keating and finds a career in the government. When she sees Keating again (after he's been one of Dominique's husbands) she tells him that if his ex-wife had been the kind of woman who would marry corrupt newspaper magnate Wynand, Keating is better off without her. As someone said, she could more aptly have told him that if Keating is the kind of man who'd marry a woman he knows despises him, to get a partnership in her father's firm, Katie is better off without Keating.
As indeed she was.
And Dominique would have been better off without Roark, but in view of her icy cruelty, it's hard to sympathise with the character.
I might actually be interested in a film, or at least a good TV documentary, about Hyman Rickover. He was an interesting guy, sort of the Steve Jobs of naval engineering (both in good ways and bad ways). I wonder how they would deal with his high praise for Columbia University, his alma mater? ("Columbia was the first institution that encouraged me to think rather than memorize.")
How do they plan to steal enough tax payer dollars to pay for most of this? How do they plan to PR their way out of needless deaths and maimings of people working in unsafe working conditions? How do they plan to cover up the sexual exploitation of females and children and young lads? How will they convince the majority of us that RWNJ propaganda is not RWNJ propaganda? Shouldn't their "American Cinematic Universe" slogan be: Lying is Truth. Hatred is Strength. Ignorance is Bliss?" UGH.
As someone who spent a lot of time in the Kindly Old Gentleman’s canoe club, I can say with certainty that Rickover was absolutely someone that none of these guys would put up with in their own organizations. Rickover HATED content-free people who thought that titles meant expertise. You know who Rickover liked? Folks like Jimmy Carter. Rickover would have spit on MAGA and used it in his speeches about the collapse of the educational system.
They should have thought about making this before the Fallout TV series came out, because it will just seem like a dull, talky, action-and-satire-free version of Vault Tec. I imagine that episodes 2 and 3 will just be a continuation of John Galt's rant.
i did like that three part Atlas Shrugged, but i think they marketed it as Bioshock.
Right wing ideologues who think they're creative and original, who can figure them? A film adaptation of ATLAS SHRUGGED has been done and it bombed. A film adaptation of THE FOUNTAINHEAD was done back in 1949, with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and it bombed as well as being panned by critics.
As for the novel ATLAS SHRUGGED, I haven't read any reviews or criticisms of it that examine the, to me, pretty obvious aspect that it uses pulp fiction vigilante tropes and types blatantly lifted from the Spider, the Shadow, and most obviously of all, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. Instead of the Phantom's skull mark or Zorro's sword-slashed Z, the recurring symbol of the mysterious avenger is the super-capitalist's "sign of the dollar." One chapter even has that for its title. Like Doc Savage, the ultimate hero of the novel, John Galt, looks as though he's made of metal - "some dimmed, soft-lustred metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy," instead of bronze, with green eyes that also seem metallic but are "harshly lustrous", and like Doc, he's a super-scientific genius who can invent anything he needs regardless of physical reality, such as a perpetual motion engine. Like Doc he has a team of brilliant aides, each one an absolute master in his particular field. Able to excel at a moment's notice in any field required, too. The CEO of a motor manufacturing company (I assume middle-aged) withdraws from the collectivist world to Galt's hideaway lair in the mountains and becomes the community's lumberjack, just like that and all by himself. No experience needed.
It's kinda telling that this dude classes John Milius with Lucas and Spielberg. Milius is an okay filmmaker, albeit a better writer than director. But he's always been a darling of fascists, because his movies tend to be steeped in jingoism and the idolization of powerful chieftains, usually lawless ones. He's a good enough writer that those choices are appropriate for the material (if not very challenging), but even when it came to mad, monstrous Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the best Milius could summon was a mild rebuke. In Red Dawn, the Cuban commander was so worn down by the Brothers' Godly Patriotism that it broke him.
More to the point, the only people who think of John Milius as a great filmmaker are fascists. And they do. You see it all the time on movie forums. The rest of us? Well, I don't hate Milius as a filmmaker. Even when his fantasies go too far into the deep end and start drowning in the silliness of their premises, he's entertaining. But I'm aware of what he's selling.
Film makers do very often get the novels and stories they bring to the screen, dead wrong. No point fretting about it. Even though I'm a fan of the original Conan stories. But it did jar on me when Conan was bought to be a slave pit fighter and accepted the role. More so when one of his masters asked him, "What is best in life?" and Conan replied with an utterance of Genghis Khan's. Milius seems to be a fan of Genghis Khan's.
Well, Hollywood has made two movies (at least) about the Mongol warlord and conqueror. Both times they made Temujin the hero instead of the villain, once played by John Wayne, once by heart-throb Omar Sharif. Both times the main focus was on Temujin's relationship with Bortai, and neither movie showed him doing what the actual Genghis Khan did, A LOT - destroying entire cities that resisted him and leaving a hillock of severed heads as a warning to others.
But yeah, anybody who admires Genghis Khan is a fascist by me.
As it happens, I just read this piece, something ‘Trix posted in Tabs this week. It's extremely relevant.
The Politics of Humiliation:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-politi/
Thanks so much for giving me a link to this article! It's very much worth reading!
There is an argument to be made that certain Hollywood studios have definitely lost the plot, but the answer is not to make more conservative movies, it's to make *better* movies.
The MCU is a good example of an IP that has run its course for now and they are out of ideas. They will never achieve the heights of the past. The fans have moved back to DC universe, and the new Superman movie is quite good, from what I've heard.
Pixar's latest attempt at a big summer blockbuster was a megaflop because the movie script was gutted to remove themes considered too 'woke' (read: gay) and the result was a hollowed out shell of a movie script that made no sense and few people are enjoying. But the K-Pop Demon Hunters from Netflix is the sleeper hit of summer, because they are capitalizing on the popular trends AND managed to tell an interesting story.
Everyone I know is tired of the Disney live action remakes.
The last time I was excited about the movie industry was Barbenheimer two years ago. New stories, great marketing campaigns, and the industry itself encouraging adults to do a classic double feature Saturday with both films and a meal break in between.
Can't they start with The Fountainhead? At least it's possible to READ that book, and the rapey stuff should really appeal to MAGA. Plus, just one movie, not a triptych!
I can see it right now, as if it were opening in Berlin CT: Taylor Schilling and The Jesus Guy play architect and Masters of the World! Cameo by JD Vance as The Loser.
I'm 63 years old. When I was 24 someone gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged to read. After the first chapter I threw it in the garbage where it belonged. It is the only book I have ever thrown away in my entire life.
Nothing but right wing propaganda at what point do we say there’s a limit to free speech and none of that BS Germany does it just fine
I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago, probably because I hated myself. Or maybe I should say I “read” it. Because a lot of the process was flipping past page after page after PAGE of mind-numbingly dull speeches by one character or another. And then picking up the thread of the plot again afterwards without a hitch.
So…if they delete the majority of the dialog they might have a movie someone would sit through. But at that point it ain’t gonna be no trilogy.
// You know what else they want to make? A three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. //
Some right winger just did that 11 years ago.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/ Part I
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985017/ Part II, "The Strike"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2800038/ Part III, "Who Is John Galt?"
ETA: Should've read the whole article first, of course Robyn brought those up.
// Then there’s The Greatest Game, a “multi-season, global spy thriller that lays bare China’s plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power by showing their operations and sometimes devastating impact from Kenya to the Atacama desert in northern Chile.” //
I'll bet a dollar that at no point will it say anything about Lonnie's doggy boys destroying American influence and consequently leaving huge openings for China and others to take our place.
I would assume they would just remake “classics” like “Birth of a Nation”, or adaptations of conservative favorites like “The Turner Diaries” or “Mein Kampf”.
"The first installment [of Atlas Shrugged] starred a pre-“Orange is the New Black” Taylor Schilling, and absolutely no one else I’ve ever heard of."
Oh come on, now. It also starred the actor and New Zealand national treasure: Grant Bowler
(rrrrrrroooowwwwwwl!)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/mediaviewer/rm3380239105/
Yes, I know he starred in this grotesque display of unfettered capitalism. But I would still hate f*ck him.
(Don't kink-shame me)
I thought The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal (1949) was a pretty good flick. The cinematography alone is worth watching it. It opened to negative reviews when it was released originally, but contemporary critics have given it much higher ratings. Wikipedia says: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 83% based on 12 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. Film critic Emanuel Levy described it as a "highly enjoyable, juicy Freudian melodrama", praising Vidor's technical virtuosity and imagery. Dave Kehr wrote "King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous 'philosophical' novel into one of his finest and most personal films, mainly by pushing the phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek considers it one of his five favorite movies: "ultracapitalist propaganda, but it’s so ridiculous that I cannot but love it.
No, the moral of The Fountainhead was once a lady gets raped right she learns to enjoy her true place.
Now that is right on target. Yes. Dominique Francon is a glaceed, hysterical bitch who hates the world she regards as mediocre and contemptible, and has never felt desire. Until she meets her rapist-hero, of course. But he has to rape her, not seduce her tenderly (she wouldn't respond to that approach anyhow) because she has a sado-masochistic streak a foot wide. (The first time she sees Roark, working in a granite quarry, she fantasises about him as a convict on a chain gang getting whipped.)
She's presented as brilliant, able to do anything and do it well at the first attempt, but she ends up as a mere adjunct to Roark's life, a long way behind his architectural profession. Her last words in the novel, when she's asked who she is, are to answer "Mrs. Roark."
For my money that's coming to a sad end. Rand apparently believed that another character, Katie Halsey, was the one who came to a sad end, because she gets dumped by unprincipled weakling Peter Keating and finds a career in the government. When she sees Keating again (after he's been one of Dominique's husbands) she tells him that if his ex-wife had been the kind of woman who would marry corrupt newspaper magnate Wynand, Keating is better off without her. As someone said, she could more aptly have told him that if Keating is the kind of man who'd marry a woman he knows despises him, to get a partnership in her father's firm, Katie is better off without Keating.
As indeed she was.
And Dominique would have been better off without Roark, but in view of her icy cruelty, it's hard to sympathise with the character.
I might actually be interested in a film, or at least a good TV documentary, about Hyman Rickover. He was an interesting guy, sort of the Steve Jobs of naval engineering (both in good ways and bad ways). I wonder how they would deal with his high praise for Columbia University, his alma mater? ("Columbia was the first institution that encouraged me to think rather than memorize.")
The rest of this stuff...bleah.