Atlas Shrugged getting several movies

Bit of an update, according to Part 3's credits listings on IMDb, the producers finally got around to employing a casting department, an editor, and now appear to be in talks with a possible director.

We all know how important finding the right director with the right experience is to the producers, so fans of the first two movies will be happy to know that one James Manera boasts over 20 years of film experience, consisting of two movie shoots in the early 90's spent working the Second Unit (and his work in this capacity on the one movie that most anybody would've heard of before is uncredited), directing a single episode of Nash Bridges a few years after that, and directing a documentary TV miniseries about music 14 additional years after that.

Not quite the track record that I'd have expected John Aglialoro to go for, but at this rate, months behind their originally projected schedule, I think they're ready to take whatever they can get.

edited 16th Dec '13 12:45:11 PM by SeanMurrayI

And it apparently has two producers, two associate producers, a co-producer and an executive producer. How many producers do you need?

All these producers and yet so little producing.

What I find amusing is that this film will almost certainly be much, much worse than Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, Bondarchuk's Waterloo, the Livanov TV series The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes And Doctor Watson and Tikhonov's Seventeen Moments Of Spring, Seryj's Gentlemen Of Fortune, Motyl's White Sun Of The Desert, the Hungarian The Red and the White, Come And See, or even The Fall of Berlin (atrocious Stalin-piece that it is). Something all of these films have in common is that they were made by Communist nations. So it seems not even King Market can make Ayn Rand beat the state's offerings

It's not a hugely serious point, but then Ayn Rand never had a serious thought. Might be fun to troll Randroids with, though.

I would laugh if someone switched the final cut of the movie with Battleship Potemkin at the premier.

Adam Lee over at www.patheos.com has taken a break from his chapter-by-chapter review of the book to review the movies. He posted his second part today, going over the casting decisions and the Unfortunate Implications of the fact that the only black character is Eddie Willers. You can read it here

edited 21st Mar '14 3:35:23 PM by Lawyerdude

Gentlemen, it looks like our dreams have come through: an entire third cast.

I'm reading the damn book again. Rand occasionally has a point, buried deep in a World Of Straw. It would have been so much better had I known everyone in it was a shapeshifter on a Bizzaro-Earth, with Blue-and-Orange Morality.

edited 16th May '14 10:36:25 AM by Rotpar

As XKCD said, the first half of every sentence she says looks logical enough, it's the second part "And therefore, be an asshole to everyone" that doesn't.

Though mind, Rand's economics, despite seeming simple enough, are actually very very wrong in pretty much every important way. Hop on over to the On-Topic Conversations General Economics thread and Fighteer would be happy to explain it in detail.

As the famous English football hooligan chant (almost) goes, in reference to the cast:

"Who are they? Who are they? Who are they?"

Thought bioshock already did a good job explaining why an objectivist economy wouldn't work?

You can read Bioshock either as a satirical deconstruction of objectivism or as an objectivist morality tale of how the Perfect Society was destroyed by greedy collectivists.

Bioshock 2 tries (operative word being tries) to show how the replacement collectivist society doesn't really work either.

The problem with the second game's moral was that it requires a Space Whale Aesop. "Don't be a collectivist or someone will try and liquefy you and put you in a Mind Hive." The first game had a supernatural element to the downfall, true, but it's made clear that the city was doomed from the start. Refusing to regulate dangerous and addictive Bio-Augmentation that could give you the ability to shoot fire from your fingers accelerated the problem, but even if ADAM had never existed, the city didn't have long to live.

Well, its not like they could really remove that element from the sequel to present the issues of said society and then reintegrate ADAM and EVE into the story again. The elements were already present... Though, BS 2 has a multitude of other issues with it...

TBH, I don't understand why we don't just get a Bioshock movie instead that focuses on the rise and fall of Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine and just write their own ending without Jack involved.

edited 18th May '14 9:23:52 AM by lancesolous13

I would argue that isn't a Space Whale Aesop, at least not fully. I mean, yes, obviously, being literally goo-ed into a hive mind requires the phlebotinum. However, that is really just an exaggeration of the tendency of collectivist societies to abuse people in the name of The People. Once you decide the Good of the Whole is the only thing that matters, then you're morally set up for goo-ing people into hive minds if you ended up with the capability. If not? You stick with more traditional thought police and borderline ( or worse ) slavery.

I agree that there is a point to be made there, but in this case it got buried under the phlebotinum. Even just having the splicers having some sort of creepy shared Madness Mantra about The Evils of Free Will would have helped underline the moral much more effectively.

Evidently they've also cast Glenn Beck and Ron Paul, it seems as themselves.

From The Onion's AV Club