Atlas Shrugged movie finally filming?!

Pop Culture
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The good news: they’re finally making an Atlas Shrugged movie, and they’re filming right now!

The bad news: pretty much every other detail associated with this story.

Just a few years ago, we were looking forward to an adaptation starring Angelina Jolie with a script from the writer of Braveheart.

Now we will get a $5 million movie directed by — and starring, as John Galt — a guy from the CW’s One Tree Hill. The screenplay is by Brian Patrick O’Toole, who did not write Braveheart, but who instead has written several direct-to-video horror movies with titles such as Evilution and Necropolitan.

I don’t want to pick on these people. It’s possible that they’ll make a decent movie. I can’t blame them for trying — I would, if I were them — and maybe freedom from studio meddling will let them make a film that’s true to the book’s ideas.

On the other hand, there’s nothing in the creators’ backgrounds to inspire confidence that they’re up to the extraordinary challenge that Atlas Shrugged presents.  Rand’s epic, cinematic book — whatever you think of her personally or of Objectivism — deserved a big budget and Hollywood’s best talent, especially now that it has surged in popularity again.

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Congressman Assaults Student on Washington Sidewalk

Police Statism, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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Apropos Jacob Huebert’s excellent post a few days ago on the time Before We Worshipped Presidents, our lesser rulers are getting increasingly used to their special, above-the-law status as well. Watch how Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge responds to being peacefully asked a simple question by a well-dressed student on a public street:

Congressman Etheridge thinks he can interrogate and assault someone simply for having the temerity to ask him a question in public, apparently without fear of retaliation or legal consequences, despite being recorded. He has a right to know who the student is? I don’t think so. He’s not police. I don’t think even a police officer would have cause under positive law to demand identification and assault the student simply for video recording and asking a question in public. In any case, their authority is illegitimate and what we have here clearly is assault even under current positive law.

What’s more disturbing is that this incident is indicative of just how much our petty tyrants view themselves as being above us and the law — though I suppose assaulting one person on the street is an improvement over assaulting millions through his legislative acts; if only he and his fellow control-freaks would cease the latter, the world would be a much better place and their private crime manageable.

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The Ghost Writer

Fiction Reviews (Movies), Pop Culture
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Libertarians may especially enjoy Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, which is now playing in second-run theaters and coming to DVD in August.

I wish I could tell you more about why, but it’s the sort of movie that’s best entered with minimal knowledge. The plot involves a man (Ewan McGregor) assigned to write the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who has recently been charged with war crimes for torture. An earlier ghost writer who worked on the book was found washed up on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, and McGregor’s unnamed character tries to solve the mystery and avoid the same fate.

It was delightful to see the movie not only call attention to the Blair/Bush/Obama war crimes but also depict the CIA as nothing other than a force for evil in the world.

Above all, though, it’s a great, old-fashioned suspense thriller — written for intelligent adults, not teenagers — which is refreshing at a time when it seems that most movies are little more than a series of special effects, brutal killings, and/or dirty jokes.

I recall that Murray Rothbard referred to a certain type of film as a “movie movie.” I’m not sure what that means, but I’m pretty sure this is one.

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Before We Worshipped Presidents

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Vulgar Politics
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Last week, Lew Rockwell posted an item about officers “subduing” and arresting two people who had the audacity to stand where President Obama’s motorcade wanted to go.

I recalled this yesterday as I read an October 1900 newspaper article, which reported an indignity that VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt suffered when newsboys threw mud at him “and greeted him with insulting language . . . as he departed from the church at which he had attended.” The story was a small item several pages into the paper and there is no indication that the boys were “subdued” or arrested, or that they got into any trouble at all. Instead, the mud-spattered TR just huffed off on his way.

The story included no quotes from experts on how terrible it is that our youth would show such disrespect for a great political leader and no editorializing.

Today, of course, this would be the top news story for a week, Chris Matthews would rend his garments over the blasphemy against our civic religion, and the kids would likely be tazed or killed, and, if they lived, charged with felonies.

Another newspaper article from the same month mentioned that trick-or-treaters stopped by the White House and were greeted by President and Mrs. McKinley. The kids weren’t participating in a photo op, but were just knocking on the front door as they would at any other house. Because you could do that, because the president was not a god.

For more details of the good old days when people treated presidents like the ordinary jerks they are (and how far we’ve fallen), I highly recommend Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.

(Cross-posted at The LRC Blog.)

UPDATE: Norman Horn points out that The Cult of the Presidency is now available online for free in PDF, Kindle, and ebook formats.

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…and this is bad because?

Education, Nanny Statism
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Over 2,400 tax-feeders-in-training are threatening to go ‘on strike’ by skipping classes today in protest over the MTA’s plan to cut NYC students’ free usage of the subway & bus system, which is an annual subsidy of at least $214 million (assuming they only use it twice a day to travel between home and school.)

Students decry the hardship and indignity of having to actually pay for something which might cut into their costly cell phone, video game and designer-jeans budgets. The strange thing is that I can’t see the downside here — in fact I’d like to think of this as a ‘win-win’ situation.

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