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NEW YORK – Allen Barra went to wager the low-budget, poorly reviewed flick adjustment of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which has targeted a Tea Party audience. He institute “Shruggies.”

“The Shruggies are coming,” the assistant trainer told me, motioning toward the patrons who processed around the tap in clusters, inactivity for entering to the prototypal display of Atlas Shrugged: Part I, free on Friday. Were there, I asked, a aggregation of face listing sales? “Some,” he said, “most of them groups. What we don’t seem to be getting is the Negro crowd.”

I had opted for the super shopping mall complex in Clifton, New Jersey, most fivesome miles from the attorney Tunnel, over the 42nd Street multiple in Manhattan, because I wanted to wager how the mass of Ayn author dressed absent from the environs of Wall Street and NYU. The gathering evidenced to be a good one, with the building most two-thirds full, and at least that whatever for the late show. Most of the men were act colourless promotional sweatshirts from heavy metal bands of the 1970s and 1980s and ballgame caps, mostly with milker Devils logos–not a Yankees container in sight.

I’m not trusty what I was expecting. Surely the biggest selling cult new in dweller history, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, had been around daylong enough to inspire three generations of mass for whom “altruism” and “collectivism” were filthy words. Were there feat to be whatever fireworks tonight? Was I travel into a Tea Party organizational meeting? Some people, I thought, might become dressed as characters from the novel–the men in three example suits and the women in shirtwaist dresses and heels. I intellection this might actually be same feat to an ultraconservative edition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Most of the pre-movie prate was most how daylong everyone had waited for this moment. I venture they’re feat to hit to move a aggregation longer for Part II.

Though Shruggies haw not want to adjudge it–perhaps because it was a incase office failure, as this flick is doomed to be–Atlas Shrugged has such in common with King Vidor’s 1949 edition of Rand’s another huge, fat novel, The Fountainhead, based on a screenplay by author herself (practically the exclusive instance she ever worked on an A-list project).

The mass of the broad priestess of belief kept hunting at apiece other, as if for a clue as to whether or not they likeable what they had meet seen.

Pauline Kael skewered it dead when she wrote, “ ... this paean to the belief of ‘superior’ grouping [is] prefabricated in a sleek, hollow, uncommunicative style ... It’s an extravaganza of romantic, right-winged camp, with a hyper-articulate superman Roark (played by metropolis Cooper) standing in the wind on top of a phallic skyscraper and a fierce, aroused Dominique (Patricia Neal) ascension in an open lift to join him there.” With a short modify or two, that’s a evenhandedly faithful evidence of individual scenes in Atlas Shrugged–minus, of course, metropolis Cooper and Patricia Neal.

I’m feat to go against the foodstuff of nearly every review I’ve feature of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t undergo what critics—most plausibly in The Hollywood Reporter and Wall Street Journal are seeing in President Schilling as the gauge magnetess, Dagny Taggart. Blond as a Fox newscaster, I saw her modify expressions meet once, and that in the test scene. saint Debruge pegged her in Variety as “a generic business suit Barbie.” I never believed her or Grant Bowler, who plays the phallic lead, the poise tycoon Hank Reardon, for modify a moment. Nor, I’m evenhandedly certain, would I ever recognize them if I saw them again. (My girl tells me that Bowler played Cooter, the werewolf in True Blood.) For that matter, I don’t believe, I’ve ever seen most of the actors in the film, except, in small parts, the guy who played the sleazy night edifice comic on Mad Men and another who had a recurring conception in Big Love.

I’ve also never seen Apostle Johansson (One Tree Hill, apparently), who plays Evangelist Galt–as in the “Who is Evangelist Galt?” that everyone keeps asking most (I counted sextet times in the movie, but I might hit missed a couple). I didn’t actually wager him as Evangelist Galt, he ever appeared in the dark with his headgear pulled downbound over his eyes, hunting same Lamont Cranston in The Shadow.

But I verify issue who those critics who feature he can’t direct. Johansson’s content of Atlas Shrugged, specially considering the film’s obvious budget limitations, is a heck of a job. Unlike the novel, it never bogs downbound in philosophic gook and moves swiftly and cleanly from environs to scene. If my module serves me, the flick got finished nearly 300 pages of text in a lowercase over 100 minutes, and since I had plans to attain it to Chevy’s for crab enchiladas and get bag in instance for Bill Maher, that was perfect.

I conceive what whatever fans of the novel–and perhaps a whatever critics who haven’t feature it but are referring to in their reviews as if it were whatever kind of classic–don’t want to face up to is that the failings of the flick lie primarily in how it reflects Rand’s text. author was inadequate of creating a veritable literate character; and, same every intense novelists, she saw falsity merely as projections of ideas.

As her digit 2009 biographers, Anne C. Heller (Ayn author and the World She Made) and Jennifer Burns (Goddess of the Market: Ayn author and the dweller Right) prefabricated clear, author knew lowercase most literature (her selection novelist was Mickey Spillane), economics, or modify philosophy. Despite aggregation titles same For the New Intellectual she wasn’t rattling a Athenian at every but an advocator who was disrespectful of democracy. (In a instance of blood-chilling candor from her 1936 new We the Living, a case representing Rand’s hunting tells a Bolshevik, “I hate your ideals. I esteem your methods.”)

And the exclusive orientation that fascinated her was, as she once admitted, “pure unadulterated laissez faire capitalism.”

Many hit spinous discover that the promulgation of Atlas Shrugged is ill-timed, reaching as America is meet beginning to dig itself discover of a financial collapse caused, in super part, by the applicatory covering of Rand’s ideas, most notably the deregulation of capitalism. Her disciple, past Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, confessed to legislature in Oct 2008, that after every these eld he had institute a damage in her ideology, videlicet that it had never condemned into account “the noesis of human greed.” (Why hadn’t he?)

But that’s the noesis of ideology--in the minds of its followers, there crapper be no flaws. As the Negro sitting in face of me place it, “If we had followed her exteroception completely, we wouldn’t be in this disorderliness now.”

When the credits rolled, there was whatever nice and perfunctory clapping. Most of the conference seemed a taste puzzled, as if they didn’t undergo how they were due to respond. The mass of the broad priestess of belief kept hunting at apiece other, as if for a clue as to whether or not they likeable what they had meet seen.

A inaccessible vocalise rang discover in the darkness, “Thank God Obama ransomed capitalism!” (My girl swears it was me.) I heard another vocalise volunteer, “I can’t move to wager this on Mystery Science Theater.” (I confess, I snickered; the intellection of those robots locution over and over “Who is Evangelist Galt?” is irresistible.)

On the way out, a earnest hunting middle-aged Negro bimanual my spouse a traveller that asked in bold: “Where is Evangelist Galt?” Answer: “He’s in New Hampshire!!! 20,000 Liberty Activists are agitated to New Hampshire as conception of the Free State Project.” I asked him if the 20,000 was meant “as a existent statement.” He gave me an unsmiling stare, then overturned away.

I exclusive missed the prototypal eight transactions of Bill Maher.

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Allen Barra writes most sports for the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. He also writes most books for Salon.com, Bookforum, and the pedagogue Post. His stylish aggregation is Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee.

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