• Check out this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts 
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“Maggie Simpson in ‘The Longest Daycare,’ ” is a five-minute gagfest with a so-so hit-to-miss ratio. Dropped off by Marge at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, Maggie tries to rescue a butterfly from the mallet of her malicious nemesis, uni-browed Baby Clarence.      View blog reactions

• • Bringing ‘unfilmable’ books to the screen 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Less fruitful are movies slavishly faithful to the source's form but not its spirit, taking as many words as possible from the page and putting them on the screen. That Classics Illustrated style torpedoed the screen version of Ayn Rand's sociopolitical manifesto "Atlas Shrugged," making a novel of ideas into a didactic talkathon.      View blog reactions

• • Film spotlight: Twin Cities Film Fest and “Atlas Shrugged, Part II” 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Capitalism  | The Ayn Rand drama "Atlas Shrugged, Part II" (PG-13 for brief language) apparently was not made by capitalists, since last year's "Part I" earned $4.6 million on a reported $20 million budget. None of the lead actors has returned for the sequel -- Samantha Mathis replaces Taylor Schilling as heroine Dagny Taggart -- but there are celebrity cameos from Sean Hannity, Grover Norquist and Teller of Penn & Teller.      View blog reactions