Richard Brody has written an irresistible pocket review of "Atlas Shrugged: Part 1" for the New Yorker's "Now Playing." It has everything Rand had -- language, titillation, ugly unnecessary poor people, and the glory of our industrial plutocrats -- everything except Rand's longeurs. Whereas an adult reading "Wind in the Willows" is seen as a legitimate reader, anyone over 19 who reads Ayn Rand probably still chews bubble gum, and should be tied down and pecked at by parasites.
Here's Brody's review. Watch out for that railway.
This comically tasteless and flavorless adaptation of Ayn Rand’s bombastic magnum opus delivers her simplistic nostrums with smug self-satisfaction. The story is set in 2016 in a dystopian America beset by economic depression and a new oil crisis, which is the pretext for rendering rail travel—the core of the novel’s plot—newly central. The railway heiress Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling) seeks to revitalize the family’s business—and the nation’s economy—by laying rails made of an untested new alloy developed by the metallurgical baron Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), while both titans are tied down and pecked at by parasites from the government, organized labor, the media, and even the scientific establishment. Meanwhile, a prophetic masked avenger packs many of the country’s great industrialists off to his compound in the hope of fuelling a “second Renaissance.” The preening resentment of the smart social misfit finds its fantasy fulfillment, as Rand’s flamboyant potboiler intensity (and her fascination with the authority of the great loner) gives rise to a tittering knowingness: the words “union” and “guild” are the pretexts for sneers and smears, and an unintentional howler of a business plan may give rise to a new, Tarzan-style pickup line: “My metal, your railway.” Directed by Paul Johansson.
Can't wait for Part 2, can you?
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