• • • Producers of Atlas Shrugged stand up for self-interest by making another film for themselves 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | In keeping with the fundament of self-interest that underscores its source material, the producers of the Atlas Shrugged movies have confirmed that a third film will be made—a film that will, again, primarily interest themselves. Both previous installments in Ayn Rand’s vision of a world righted by corporate shit-fits have earned far less than they cost, taking in a combined $8 million at the box office for the approximately $30 million that was spent on them. Such numbers would lead most filmmakers to see this as an edict from the free market to just yield their work to some other’s control already, were they not still subscribed to Rand’s definition of objective thinking as “harboring hate-filled petulance for things that get in your way.”  

• Dispatches From Direct To DVD Purgatory 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | If you were to lobotomize Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, then dose it with bad acid, then trick it into an ideologically confused, bewildering act of procreation with Atlas Shrugged while No Logo masturbated awkwardly nearby, you wouldn’t quite have Branded, but you’d be headed in the right direction.   

• TV: What's On Tonight? 
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The Simpsons (Fox, 8 p.m.): As a prelude to Maggie Simpson’s big night at the Oscars, The Simpsons splits its time between a new Milhouse adventure and the Academy Award-nominated short “The Longest Daycare.” Ayn Rand School for Tots survivor Robert David Sullivan isn’t keen on revisiting his alma mater.  

• THE SIMPSONS: "Hardly Kirk-ing" 
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This episode was followed by the five-minute Simpsons short “The Longest Daycare,” which was released theatrically in 2012. The dialogue-free cartoon puts Maggie in the Ayn Rand School For Tots, where she tries to save a butterfly from being crushed by the sadistic, unibrow Baby Gerald.  

• • R.I.P. Richard Collins, blacklisted screenwriter 
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Song Of Russia was one of three films denounced by HUAC as “pro-Soviet propaganda,” with Ayn Rand called upon by the committee as an anti-communist expert to assess the film. She testified that it was full of deliberately misleading impossibilities, such as scenes in which people living under the yoke of Communism are seen “dancing very happily,” as well as showing Soviet people smiling—something she assured the Committee actual Soviets never did. (“If they do, it is privately and accidentally,” she added.)  

• • The “gentleman’s F” and the scourge of deliberate mediocrity 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | By and large, I much prefer the movies I’ve given an F over those I’ve given a D-, or often well above. In other words, when the Atlas Shrugged trilogy finally ends with Dagny Taggart tossing Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States into the fires of Mordor, I’ll be there on opening day, queuing up with my lightsaber and my Glenn Beck Rally To Restore Honor T-shirt. If the third Atlas Shrugged film is anything like the first two, it’ll be cheap, incompetently staged, atrociously acted, and unctuous to its core, but at least it’ll be an experience.  

• “It’s About Time” 
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The Fountainhead  | Hannah may still have a thing for Adam, but she’s doing her best to make this Sandy thing work. She winds up at his house at the end—to borrow his copy of The Fountainhead, of all things—and she lays out some ground rules that are, yes, ridiculous but also sort of a good series of rules for someone like her who wants to avoid another something like Adam.  

• • Jack Reacher 
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Atlas Shrugged  | There’s an unpleasantly condescending, moralizing tone to Jack Reacher, worthy of Atlas Shrugged; his abilities are meant to justify anything he chooses to do, whether it’s intimidating that bar-girl into giving him her car, or murdering an unarmed man out of a sense of entitled justice. Jack Reacher isn’t much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn’t the story of a man. It’s mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.  

• Breaking The Code Of Silence is a tell-all, by Mos Def's ex-wife, that tells little 
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Personal life  | [AlanaWyatt-Smith] was deeply in love with the anonymous basketball player (just as she was deeply into the dozens of interchangeable big shots that preceded him) until she discovered something shocking and horrifying that put the future of their relationship in doubt. But we have no idea what the “unpleasant information” was—He was an Objectivist? He thoughts kittens were gross? He was secretly a zombie?—so the anecdote is just as confusing and meaningless as everything else in the book.  

• • • Peer inside the psyche of Atlas Shrugged fans at the website of the film series’ “Collec 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | We here at The A.V Club are perversely fascinated by GaltsGulchOnline, the official “Collective” of the Atlas Shrugged movie series. The website unintentionally provides a fascinating insight into the humorless, paranoid, self-aggrandizing psyches of the Objectivists who have made spreading the word about the Atlas Shrugged film series a heroic quest.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: Part II—The Strike 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Going Galt  | Atlas Shrugged is premised on the idea that the world only has a few true geniuses—great industrialists, inventors, musicians, and artists, too, albeit plainly none involved in the making of the Atlas Shrugged movies—and “going Galt” means they’re going to take their toys and go home. The arrogance of that is astounding, and it robs both parts of this adaptation of empathy, which is the primordial soup of good drama.  

• • Looking beyond the cover—and the baggage—of Battlefield Earth 
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Paul Ryan  | In many ways, Battlefield Earth resembles the work of a contemporary of Hubbard’s, someone who also suffuses her writing with cardboard characters, black-and-white morality, a stunted fixation on romantic adventure, and a megalomaniacal desire to turn her fictitious belief system into a real-world cult: Ayn Rand. Sadly, both succeeded. Maybe it’s no accident that I became infatuated with Rand’s novels as a teenager, a few years after reading Battlefield Earth. It’s easy to dismiss this kind of broad, sweeping fiction, with its straw men and stock villains and reductive views of humanity. But when you’re an adolescent, it’s comforting—even empowering—to stumble across such a pat, sharply defined way of compartmentalizing reality. Granted, some people never grow out of it, and we’re left with the Tom Cruises and Paul Ryans of the world.  

• Adventure TIme 
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Man, Goliad goes from childlike innocence to the full Ayn Rand in about an hour. That’s gotta be a record.  

• • Finding the perfect gifts for the political dissidents in your life 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Tea Partiers don’t have the time to read all 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged, even if they’ve unknowingly resolved to base their entire lives around its teachings. Thankfully, for once Hollywood has their back in this year’s film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s objectivist tome, now available for rental from Four Star Video Heaven.  

• • • Heroically Self-Interested Case File #4: Atlas Shrugged: Part I 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Video  | Rand’s book and Atlas Shrugged: Part I are both swooning, asinine, empty-headed valentines to the unfettered free market and the wisdom of laissez-faire economics, so it’s exquisitely ironic that the free market failed Atlas Shrugged: Part I. Or maybe Atlas Shrugged: Part I failed the free market, since it grossed well under $5 million, far less than even its miniscule, radically scaled-down budget.  

• • Rush, “Subdivisions” 
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Individualism  |Rush  | [Neal] Peart’s attraction to individualism has never been a secret—at least not since he dedicated Rush’s 1976 breakthrough, 2112, to the arch-individualist Ayn Rand. Peart moved away from Rand’s hardline Objectivist dogma fairly early in life, subsequently accepting such decidedly non-Randian beliefs as Eastern philosophy and, um, a love of Linkin Park.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged producers boldly release unregulated DVD with inaccurate cover 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Image  | Arriving just in time for the season of giving all the leeches in your life the fruits of your autonomous production, Atlas Shrugged Part 1 has at last made its way to DVD and Blu-ray, where its messages about Objectivism can be enjoyed by the whole family, some of whom should be ashamed. But if you’ve already picked up a copy, maybe don’t read the back cover, or else you’ll be inundated with a lie (and as everyone knows, lies force you to become the world’s slave). Fortunately, most Ayn Rand fans don’t generally like to read, but if they make an exception this time, they’ll find their DVD emblazoned with a text trumpeting, “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…” And of course, as anyone familiar with the book or Rand’s philosophy knows, “self-sacrifice” is the exact opposite of what Atlas Shrugged is all about, because there is nothing more important than yourself, who is totally badass, and sacrificing it in favor of people who are not as badass is a sign of weakness. We pause here to vomit profusely.  

• Nomad Canned Food Drive Rock Show 

[Colder In Moscow] harbors an oddly vocal libertarian streak, listing Ron Paul and Ayn Rand among the “Band Interests” on its Facebook page.  

• • “The Invasion” (Episodes 5-8) 
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Classic Doctor Who episode review.
[Tobias] Vaughn drives everything that happens in the story, and his ultimate goal is, basically, that of a fascist/Objectivist James Bond villain: “You think I’m mad, that all I want is power for its own sake. No, I have to have power. The world is weak, vulnerable, a mess of uncoordinated and impossible ideals. It needs a strong man, a single mind. A leader!”  

• Alphas: “Original Sin” 
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Gary and Bill [...] have been doing research into Stanton Parish, the favorite long-dead author of Red Flag, sort of their Ayn Rand, if you will.