Another Movie Thread - Because We Love Them So

[Jim]

I guess my biggest critique is that I'm uncertain the "philosophy", and therefore character motivation, is coming through clearly enough.

I did enjoy it, and it was a worthy low budget effort. But, I would have made different choices in adapting the screenplay, casting, wardrobe, hair, cinematography, etc. It's not an over polished "Hollywood" blockbuster, but I didn't expect it to be. I'm just happy it's coherent, and true to the book even if the *real* story remains obscured.

Hi,

About 2 or 3 years ago at an Any Rand web site we had a thread dealing with all of your concerns.

We wanted a TV version of AS like Roots, we all agreed a movie could not be true to the book in only 2 to 3 hours. That at least six 2 hour episodes would be needed to get the book's philosophy across.

Casting: John Galt = Robert Redford or Brad Pitt. Dagny = Debra Winger or Sigourney Weaver.

I giggled about 4 times during the movie, because "I GOT IT" well I read the book as many times so you get to a point like seeing the same movie 4 times, you know the dialog & what will happen next.

The one I remember was the scene with the Hugh Akston who is already in Galt's valley lightning a cigarette...it had the Gold emblem from Galt's valley, it went by so fast but I think it was a Dollar sign $

What was missing was when Dagny in the book describes the vacant eyes of the people she would encounter, and their countenance without emotion.

I want to see this movie again, I might have missed something.

EDIT:

Cigarettes with Gold Dollar Sign:

Cigarettes stamped with a golden dollar symbol $ (instead of a brand name) turn up from time to time in the story. Rand used cigarettes as a metaphor for humanity's conquest of fire. To Rand, cigarettes are a symbol of humanity's first great technological achievement. In Atlas Shrugged.

He produced a package of cigarettes and extended it to her [...] It was a plain white package that bore, as a single imprint, the sign of the dollar [...] There was no printing on the package, no trade name, no address, only the dollar sign stamped in gold. The cigarettes bore the same sign.

Ayn Rand chose a cigarette to represent money and capitalism partially because of its connotation of fire, and the significance of that to themes of Atlas Shrugged.

In the early 1970s Rand’s health began to give way. An enthusiastic smoker, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. For Rand, smoking was a Promethean symbol of creativity, inventiveness, profit-making, all she most admired: "When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression," one of the goodies explains in Atlas Shrugged. [After her death] a six-foot-high floral dollar sign was erected by her open coffin in the funeral home.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged/Things