Sunday, April 24, 2011

Atlas Shrugged

Who is John Galt? We saw Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 Saturday at a King County GOP benefit. Very interesting. Not a great movie, but is is attractively done. It is short; the book could be done in two parts, rather than three.

The Hollywood establishment is stunned:

Chicago Sun Times

The power of Ayn Rand devotees has impressed some Hollywood distribution executives, who took note of the hefty $5,640 per-theater average scored by “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1” during its opening weekend.

“Shocking,” one executive said about the healthy business the low-budget film has been doing, considering its “awful” marketing plan.

Awful or not, business has been brisk enough for producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro to expand from 299 theaters to 425 this weekend and to 1,000 by the end of the month. They don’t have enough film prints to fill all the orders.

Correction, S-T, the audience is not all devotees of Ayn Rand. It is a rare movie that honors individual effort and achievement over a government machine. A lot of non-big-government people, like me, welcome this movie.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree with many of Ayn Rand's criticisms of the Left, and I hope this movie will weaken people's confidence in government paternalism. At the same time, I think Ayn Rand's idea of utopia would be hell-on-earth in practice, a place with no compassion, no grace, no love.

So I wish the movie limited success. I hope it stirs an appreciation for creating wealth and a resentment toward able-bodied people who sponge off others. But I hope it does not draw people to her simplistic, atheist, cold-hearted worldview.