• • • The DVD Wrapup 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |The Fountainhead movie  | Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike: Blu-ray
It’s legitimate to wonder who in their right mind thought that pouring more money into the “Atlas Shrugged” trilogy was a good idea. The first installment laid a large egg commercially and critically, and the market for such a diatribe appears to be limited to the English-speaking world.  

• • Wilmington on Movies: Identity Thief 
,
The Fountainhead  | The phony Sandy  [...] goes on a shopaholic’s rampage, just at the touchy moment when the real Sandy is driven  to leave his old corporation (partly run by Jon Favreau as a smirking, bonus-happy Ayn Rand fan named Cornish) in order to help start a new one [...]. [....] [I]n one of the more flabbergasting plans since Howard Roark blew up his own building in Cornish‘s favorite novel, “The Fountainhead,” Sandy, one of the last guys you’d want to send on a cross-country pickup of a psychopath, drives off, in all his obvious street-unwisdom, to find the credit swindler, bring her back, and get her to confess to his bosses.  

• • • The DVD Wrapup: Harry Potter, Better Tomorrow, Atlas Shrugged, Identification Of A Woman 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The version of “Atlas Shrugged” that finally [found] its way to the big screen this summer may as well have been adapted from a Classics Illustrated version of the novel. The script is greatly undernourished and it’s possible the actors were cast because they’d work for peanuts … real peanuts, not money. The timing of the movie’s release didn’t help much, either. Adherents of Rand’s philosophy of objectivism and survival-of-the-fittest theories have given us the greatest economic calamity in 80 years and a collection of Republican presidential candidates who collectively couldn’t beat a chimp on “Jeopardy!” The movie, which was supposed to have been delivered in three separate episodes, imagines how our nation might look if industrialists were forbidden from maximizing their ability to run their businesses the way they see fit.  

• Wilmington On DVD: Inside Job, Senso, TCM Greatest Classic Legends: Jean Harlow & more… 
,
Alan Greenspan  | [In Inside Job], director/writer Charles Ferguson and producer Audrey Marrs do a splendid job [....] of proving that people like long-time Fed chairman Alan Greenspan should never have gone near an Ayn Rand book, and that he should now perhaps perform public penance and return most of what’s left of the hefty salaries he collected during his over-hyped tenures.  

• • • The Atlas Shrugged trailer … Shrug 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Video  |Inaccurate  | Maybe it’s just me, but I never fully appreciated just how atrociously bad Ayn Rand’s ear for realistic dialogue was until I heard it expressed in this trailer. Maybe part of it is the direction and the delivery, but sweet Mother Mary! What is with all the yelling, and the laughably earnest line delivery, and the dude who looks like he’s trying to channel Philip Seymour Hoffman but doing it badly? I get that to a large extent their hands were likely tied on the dialogue. The Ayn Rand Institute and Leonard Peikoff (who sold rights to the novel to Aglialoro) probably had all kinds of stipulations in there about not changing Rand’s language and having to pull dialogue directly from the book.  

• TIFF dispatch day five: It’s kind of a funny film festival story… 
,
I’ve tried to be as objective as possible in looking at this film and how I felt about it, and I just don’t know that there’s any way for me to say that my take on the film at this point is anything but purely subjective. Then again, all criticism is and must be subjective, unless you’re an Objectivist, I guess, and then you’d have to argue that the film qua film is this or that; A is A, good is good, bad is bad, right?  

• • Iron Man 2 
,
The Fountainhead  | I did find it interesting that there's been some buzz about this film as pro-military, pro-Conservative propoganda when [Garry] Shandling's character is basically advocating not a capitalist position, which would hold that [Tony] Stark's invention is his to do with as he wishes, but a socialist one, which would argue (as Shandling's Senator Stern does) that the good of the people outweighs Stark's right to control and own his intellectual and physical property. Stern [....] obviously hasn't been reading his Ayn Rand, but then neither does Stark turn all Howard Roark and start blowing up Iron Man suits by way of keeping them out of the hands of the thieves, either. All of which is just another way in which the script seems uncertain of its ideas and philosophical underpinnings.  

• • Vadim Perelman 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Perelman believes his next film will be an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's epic philosophical novel that centers on a female railroad executive confronting a world that's lost its balance.