posted
Atlas shrugged movie is worse than the book, and I felt the book was fairly awful.
Part of what bugs me about the movie is they try to shoehorn the plot based around trains into the near future timeline by an idiotic oil crisis 'oil 80$ a gallon' which forces us to abandon planes and cars and go to pure train transport. They keep modern things like cell phones and computers, but then have CEOs completely out of touch about major happenings in their industry. They have train accidents that modern technology has essentially completely eliminated. Then they do trains doing 250 MPH, but with no safety precautions needed to actually provide safety.
Also they keep all of the naive and childish dialog and plotting of the book but make it worse.
Also you don't see any of the obvious things that people would do if for some reason oil went ridiculously high and for some bizarre reason we lost all knowledge and ability to go with the only slightly more expensive alternatives (biodiesel, oil from shale/coal, electric powered vehicles). Ie cabs and cars are still being driven and jets being flown, you don't see any rickshaws or bikes, or even significant numbers of people walking.
Also the 'reardon steel' it isn't like you can just use any untested steel for construction - either it would be certified as meeting certain engineering standards or it wouldn't.
Also the ham handed treatment of politics is absurd as well.
So they have taken all of the worst elements of the book and magnified them with even worse plotting, scripting, and fairly weak acting.
Posts: 6524 | Registered: Jan 2001
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Added to my Netflix queue. It gets a 3.6 out of 5 on Netflix. So apparently most Netflixers found it decent.
Posts: 4698 | Registered: Oct 2009
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quote:(A deeply ironic and smirk-worthy "oops" appeared on the cover of the DVD version, blurbing ATLAS SHRUGGED as a saga of "courage and self-sacrifice" -- which would be the ultimate Randian sin!)
And if you don't go through that, you should at least look at:
Which discusses the long lost sequel (I might have posted that here elsewhere, but it's still an amusing bridge between Rand's own works.)
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It's one of the English world's most polarizing books: it wouldn't surprise me if those who saw the movie were pretty heavily weighted towards those who already 'liked' the book and were more apt to also 'like' the movie.
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On the other hand, the movie scored 11% on the tomatometer scale, and 5.5/10 on imdb (with a 20/100 metascore!) Pretty consistent with the theory of self-selection bias, methinks.
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posted
I watched the movie right after inhaling the book and I still thought it sucked. The experience probably changed my life because it didn't change my life.
Posts: 4561 | Registered: Feb 2011
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quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: It's one of the English world's most polarizing books: it wouldn't surprise me if those who saw the movie were pretty heavily weighted towards those who already 'liked' the book and were more apt to also 'like' the movie.
I'm pretty sure that's true of every book adaptation. But yes, I agree. However, I didn't particularly 'like' the book, but it's still an interesting story.
However, this is certainly a low budget indie film, so it certainly won't score well from a general audience perspective in any case.
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I especially loved that "lost" sequel (the "second" book of the "trilogy"), Pyrtolin. That journal article pretty much eviscerates Atlas. Posts: 7255 | Registered: Dec 2000
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I do like the comparison of Ayn Rand to Karl Marx. Both of them suffer from a good idea carried way to far. And I can see the similarities between Rand's utopia and Marx dystopia.
I haven't read The Fountainhead, but maybe I should. I never could finish Atlas Shrugged and I agree with the general criticisms of the novel. Perhaps The Fountainhead would be a better target.
quote: But pause a moment. How does the book hold up, strictly from the perspective of writing and art? Well... I won't mince words. ATLAS SHRUGGED royally sucks as a novel, with cardboard characters, rivers of contrived coincidence and dialogue made of macaroni. (Can you dig a 70 page SPEECH?) Of course, none of those things matter if your taste runs to an endless smorgasbord of indignant resentment. (A scientifically-verified drug high!) In which case the speechifying is mother's milk.
Heck, the left produces plenty of polemics just as turgidly tendentious. In fact, the previous paragraph pretty much described Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale'.
I didn't think The Handmaid's Tale was as bad as Atlas Shrugged, but there were sections you were better off skimming through.
quote: To see this danger expressed far better - and more succinctly - than Rand ever managed, read the terrific Kurt Vonnegut story: Harrison Bergeron. Other expressions of legitimate libertarian worry can be seen in the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. They have a point.
Certainly, 'Harrison Bergeron', is excellent. And both Bradbury and Heinlein are great authors with lot's of excellent Libertarian leaning books. I actually always assume that 'The Handmaid's Tale' was based upon Heinlein's earlier novels.
quote: Yes, I'll admit that Ayn Rand at least portrays technology as good. That gives her points over the dismal Tea Partiers, or Fox, or the equally dismal (though less-numerous) science haters of a ditzy-fringe far left.
This statement is just a joke. I can't really speak for any Randian's, but I've heard plenty of Tea Partiers speak and I've never heard them come out against technology in general. And the same is true of Fox. If you want to hear anti-nuclear rhetoric or how GMO's are the coming scourge you need to turn on MSNBC. Sure, you might hear some comments disdainful of solar/wind power or ethanol, but that's primarily do to the governmental subsidies, not a disdain of technology.
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quote:but that's primarily do to the governmental subsidies
But yet not a grumble on the far larger subsidies that we give to oil and coal. You also missed global warming issues as one of the big ticket items, but he's just referring back to something that he's talked about for a while in general:
quote:Name one that isn’t under fire from the new-right! Scientists, teachers, university professors, attorneys, civil servants, diplomats, journalists... heck even cops! And yes, if you have watched carefully, or know anything about the “miracle of 2006”-- even the brilliant men and women of the United States Military Officer Corps have been under assault, for years.
Why? Why has such a broad campaign to discredit (almost) every highly skilled and educated expert class become the centerpiece of conservatism? A hijacked version of conservatism that has Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave? You have only to look at the few centers of elite expertise that have been left alone! Those that are spared this all-out onslaught. The financial industry, industry lobbyist associations, and the hyper-rich.
A select group who are spared attack by Fox News. Now why would these groups want to fund propaganda aimed at undermining all other intellectual elites? Unless... in order to the power of those with the skill and fact-based knowledge to notice and point fingers at outright lies....?
quote:Mooney shows there are countless tricks, some old and others innovative, that special interests can use when scientific consensus becomes politically inconvenient. One has been to banish science from centers of power -- for example, when the GOP-led Congress dismantled its own, nonpartisan advisory tool, the Office of Technology Assessment, because its counsel kept conflicting with ideological views. Another is for political aides to edit the reports of scientific panels, so that final versions offer conclusions quite different than panel members intended. Threats to job security can squelch whistleblowers. Another method, used more frequently of late, has been to pack advisory groups with "experts" who were selected on a basis of ideology, or industry affiliation, or promises to reach a predetermined outcome.
Mooney disapproves of the mass media's obsession with gladiatorial opposition when covering contentious issues like Creationism and global climate change. Countless news stories seek entertaining "balance" by portraying both sides as evenly matched, equally vehement. This appeals to viewers' sense of fair play, sometimes even cheering underdogs vs. snooty, scientific authority figures. But such "balance" can also empower fringe groups to stay in the fray forever, magnifying uncertainty indefinitely, preventing any conclusion from being reached.
quote:Originally posted by JWatts: [QUOTE] However, this is certainly a low budget indie film, so it certainly won't score well from a general audience perspective in any case.
It seems to score poorly with viewers and critics who actually like low budget indy films, so perhaps the film's poor reception was due to the fact that it's badly made ham-fisted bollocks and not because it's outside the mainstream. Seriously, it's one of the most notorious turkeys since the church of sci-... err, since John Travolta decided to make Battlefield Earth.
Posts: 503 | Registered: Oct 2010
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quote:Originally posted by TheRallanator: It seems to score poorly with viewers and critics who actually like low budget indy films, so perhaps the film's poor reception was due to the fact that it's badly made ham-fisted bollocks and not because it's outside the mainstream. Seriously, it's one of the most notorious turkeys since the church of sci-... err, since John Travolta decided to make Battlefield Earth.
Evidence would indicate it rated low but not as bad as you indicate.
Atlas Shrugged ratings: IMDB - 5.5/10 Netflix - 3.5/5 Rotten Tomatoes: 11% critic but 76% audience Moviefone: Critic 28%; audience 92% Yahoo Movie User review: 4/5
So I would agree that the critics hated it, but it gets reasonably decent audience reviews.
Of course it was a relatively unknown film so the audience was almost certainly far more politically inclined and libertarian leaning than a broader audience would be.
posted
The producers affirm that this is likely the case - not directly, but by observing that they could not get any interest from major distributors, and were forced to put all their marketing budget into reaching out to Tea Party sympathizers and related organizations.
I expect that the vast majority of people to have even heard of the movie in the first place were tea partiers.
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G2
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Yeah, that can be the only possible explanation. Well, I suppose it's better than independent thought.
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This might help you understand, G2: if you sampled only the progressives that watched a badly-directed left-wing movie (say, something by Michael Moore) would you expect the resulting reviews to be more positive than if you forced randomly selected moviegoers to watch and critique the film?
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I thought Brin's critique of Rand in general was spot-on, especially when he notes Marx and Plato as her true (if not her claimed) influences. And the no-children thing. I also think her epistemology bears more than a little resemblance to Sartre.
Read the Fountainhead in college. Liked it. Also liked Anthem. Couldn't get into Atlas -- that book was just terrible! So calculated and analytical, it was flensed of all humanity. Utterly cardboard. I stopped at page 150, during some passage about differential calculus and Reardon metal.
Posts: 1524 | Registered: Sep 2010
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G2
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quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: This might help you understand, G2: if you sampled only the progressives that watched a badly-directed left-wing movie (say, something by Michael Moore) would you expect the resulting reviews to be more positive than if you forced randomly selected moviegoers to watch and critique the film?
This might help you understand, not all movies panned by critics are similarly panned by audiences. From Rotten Tomatoes:
Red Tails 36% critic but 67% audience The Da Vinci Code 25% critic but 64% audience Transformers: Dark of the Moon 35% critic but 67% audience Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 25% critic but 65% audience Bad Boys II 23% critic but 80% audience
That's just a few but there are literally hundreds of movies with similar disparities between critical and general audience reviews. It's a relatively common occurrence. Maybe Tea Party reviewers have elevated the numbers some but you have no way of knowing how much. Or maybe they didn't. No way to even reliably estimate it.
quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: You don't think tea party supporters are capable of independent thought?
Quite clearly you avoided it in this case and simply parroted the meme you were fed. It fits with some preconceived framework you have so you did not even think to question if it was common for such differences to exist between critical and audience reviews.
quote:This might help you understand, not all movies panned by critics are similarly panned by audiences.
Who made a claim otherwise? Any rating by a self-selected group is going to be unreliable, because only those that care enough to assert their rating will be represented. The only way to get an honest general audience rating would be to randomly select a large number of people, show them the movie, and then ask them to rate it. Otherwise selection bias makes the numbers useless.
Even the critical aggregates don't mean much, but they're a little better because they at least represent a controlled baseline, but a person needs to have a sense of where they agree and differ with any given critic to meaningfully interpret that critic's review.
Posts: 7658 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Quite clearly you avoided it in this case and simply parroted the meme you were fed
Actually, I introduced that particular 'meme', but if it makes you feel better to believe otherwise, have at it.
As for there being "No way to even reliably estimate [how Tea Party reviewers have elevated the numbers]" well, we have given several reasons to believe that the population of those who actually went to see the movie very likely skewed heavily towards tea party sympathizers. You may discount that analysis, but simply ignoring those facts and pretending abject ignorance doesn't advance your argument.
Now, it's possible that those non-professional reviewers who chose to submit reviews were atypically not tea party sympathetic, but you probably should give a reason for that belief if that is what your implying.
Posts: 9925 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:Red Tails 36% critic but 67% audience The Da Vinci Code 25% critic but 64% audience Transformers: Dark of the Moon 35% critic but 67% audience Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 25% critic but 65% audience Bad Boys II 23% critic but 80% audience
Huh. So the evidence here is that when critics really hate a movie, only stupid people go to see it. Posts: 18729 | Registered: Nov 2000
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G2
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quote:Originally posted by DonaldD:
quote:Quite clearly you avoided it in this case and simply parroted the meme you were fed
Actually, I introduced that particular 'meme', but if it makes you feel better to believe otherwise, have at it.
Nah, you got it from somewhere you just introduced it here after Tom's post.
quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: As for there being "No way to even reliably estimate [how Tea Party reviewers have elevated the numbers]" well, we have given several reasons to believe that the population of those who actually went to see the movie very likely skewed heavily towards tea party sympathizers. You may discount that analysis, but simply ignoring those facts and pretending abject ignorance doesn't advance your argument.
Maybe it was skewed, sounds reasonable. However a lot of reasonable sounding things aren't factual. Heavily skewed? Simply saying it is not proof and pretending abject ignorance doesn't advance your argument.
quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: Now, it's possible that those non-professional reviewers who chose to submit reviews were atypically not tea party sympathetic, but you probably should give a reason for that belief if that is what your implying.
I'm not saying they we or they weren't. I'm saying you can't know for sure or in what amounts or if it slightly or heavily skewed ratings. You don't know. But I suppose it makes you feel better to think it was almost 100% tea party sympathizers and I'd hate for you to feel stressed so if you think you have proof of it then just go ahead and believe it. It's gonna be ok.
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Actually, you will notice that I introduced the likelihood of selection biases 3 days before Tom even posted on the thread.
I appreciate the fact that you think I am not only prescient but have more than a 3-day effective forecast window.
Now as usual, you are avoiding any attempt to address the substance of arguments. Do you dispute that the producers themselves described that their marketing money was used to promote the movie almost exclusively within the tea party and other 'conservative' groups, and that they also depended on grass roots efforts within those groups?
Posts: 9925 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
I took a much needed break the other day from bar review and went to see "Red Tails." Heavy on the fromage, but I loved it to bits. The air combat rocked. I ignore film critics, almost as much as Objectivists. Just putting that out there.
quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: Now as usual, you are avoiding any attempt to address the substance of arguments. Do you dispute that the producers themselves described that their marketing money was used to promote the movie almost exclusively within the tea party and other 'conservative' groups, and that they also depended on grass roots efforts within those groups?
Now as usual, you are engaging in a logical fallacy (strawman). It's irrelevant how they promoted it since you have no way of knowing if there is any link much less a significant one between the movie's promotion and its reviews. Maybe there was some link, maybe there wasn't. You have no idea if there was one or it's total effect on the reviews. None. There probably was some. If it makes you feel good to think it the reviews were 100% by the audience to which it was promoted (or whatever number you think) then by all means feel free to do so. I want you to feel good.
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You really don't understand what a strawman argument is
You also don't seem to have understood my argument. I didn't suggest that the marketing had any effect on the reviews; what I did say was that the marketing had an effect on who went to see the movie.
Posts: 9925 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:Originally posted by DonaldD: The producers affirm that this is likely the case - not directly, but by observing that they could not get any interest from major distributors, and were forced to put all their marketing budget into reaching out to Tea Party sympathizers and related organizations.
I expect that the vast majority of people to have even heard of the movie in the first place were tea partiers.
Tea Partiers and people who like giggling at Tea Partiers. The movie got quite a bit of media attention (mainly from biased political publications on both sides of the aisle) and was blogged about to hell and back thanks to its divisive subject matter. For an indy movie that wasn't getting rave reviews on the festival circuit, Atlas Shrugged generated an impressive amount of buzz.
Which makes its dismal box office showing even more impressive Posts: 503 | Registered: Oct 2010
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quote:Originally posted by G2: Red Tails 36% critic but 67% audience The Da Vinci Code 25% critic but 64% audience Transformers: Dark of the Moon 35% critic but 67% audience Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 25% critic but 65% audience Bad Boys II 23% critic but 80% audience
My god that's a breathtakingly terrible list of movies. If you were trying to prove that the general public has worse taste than the critics, then you've succeeded beyond all expectations Posts: 503 | Registered: Oct 2010
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