User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Buy MLB playoff tickets, plus 2011 World Series, 2011 ALCS tickets and NLCS game tickets. We also have Texas Rangers playoff schedule, tickets to Red Sox games and Yankees game tickets. Plus, buy Phillies baseball tickets, Tigers playoff tickets and the biggies like ALDS baseball tickets and 2011 NLDS tickets. |
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
Page rendered in 0.7535 seconds
55 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
By sheer coincidence, when I clicked on the link, the ever-changing ad was showing a ballplayer with moths flying out of his angry black beard. He could have been the Little Orphan Aynies' designated lawyer.
Dear god....
...the children. Wont anyone think of the children?
What's the point? Our oppressive government won't let us hire them to work in our factories and salt mines, so there's no point in fretting over them.
And in an early schadenfreude highlight of 2011, it reportedly sucks hard.
Already out. (Well, part 1, anyway.) The reviews have mostly indicated it's awful. Of course, it can be difficult to separate politics from film critique, but a good reviewer can do it. Roger Ebert -- a proud leftist -- gave it one star, and his review makes it pretty clear that even if you are an objectivist or libertarian or whatever, you'll likely find the movie incoherent rubbish. Review is here.
Edit: cokes all around.
So far that claim appears to be solidly refuted by the evidence on RottenTomatoes.com, where 85% of the nearly 7,500 reviewers in the general audience liked it, as compared to only 8% of the professional reviewers.
Could be. I haven't seen it (and have no plans to). My general experience has been that when Ebert shreds a movie it's not worth my time, but there are always exceptions.
And since the source material is terrible, I have a hard time believing it'll make a good movie.
It's better to have 1000 people love you than 1,000,000 like you.
"Lords of the Flyballs"
"Catchers in the Rye"
"The Time MACHINE" (logo: Pat Burrell in fetish gear fighting Morlocks)
"Ball-Diamonds are Forever"
"The Girls Who Loved Tom Gordon" (too easy)
Audiences tend to like bad movies a lot more than critics. "The Number 23," for example, has 8% critical approval on RT as opposed to 61% of people who have seen it liking it. Admittedly, in my 30 seconds or so of browsing movies I assumed would have a <10% rating on RT, I did not find anything with as big a gap as Atlas Shrugged.
It's even getting panned by a lot of right-wing partisans, whom you'd expect to be as inclined to like it as anybody:
Even the comparatively positive right-wing reviews, like this one by Kyle Smith in The New York Post, ground their case more in the thematic message of the book than in the actual entertainment-type merits of the film (which includes, in Smith's words, "stilted dialogue and stern, unironic hectoring").
- Nigel Tufnel
It's a function of the fact that only far-right true-believers are going to have any interest in buying a ticket for a movie like this on the opening weekend, and that's a population that's disproportionally predisposed to like it. If you grabbed a nundred people at random and forced them to watch any low-budget genre picture targeted at a small subgroup, their reviews would be a lot less positive than those of the self-selecting population willing to pay to see it. It's the same deal with Atlas Shrugged as it is with giallo horror, or stoner comedies, or kaiju eiga, or whatever.
I assume everyone here knows that Moneyball's Michael Lewis is married to Tabitha Soren.
Yup, same guy. He started writing movie reviews for them last year, I think.
You need one movie just for John Galt's speech. My message to Ayn. We get it already.
And hairdressers. Every other hair salon is called "A Cut Above" or something similar.
I bet you could turn that into a pretty good comedy bit, actually. With bored passers-by collapsing in stupefaction, drained of their will to live, as he keeps droning on, and on, and on...
A lot of the reviews, even the right-wing ones, complain about the movie's clunky, wooden dialogue, which kind of confuses me. Haven't they ever read the book?
Maybe they just wanted to be faithful to the source material?
EDIT: Gaaaah.
This is when people making a movie need to be more liberal with the original source material. It's obvious that the train companies of the 1950's were similar to the oil companies of today. If Taggart had been running an oil company and Reardon was a guy in the automotive industry (or if Taggart were in the automotive industry and Reardon was in the energy business), it would have required zero change to the message.
I'm far from a Rand-head (hell I'm more left-wing than right), but I really liked Atlas Shrugged... I thought the story was extremely rich and even if you don't agree with the whole political philosophy of the book, I still think it's one of the great books of the last 60 years. It's a damn shame that they couldn't make a movie that lived up to the promise of the source material.
see No 22.
Also, The two "good" reviews are a hoot.
One came from a conservative blog site, where the reviewer admitted the film sucks, but gave it 2.5 stars anyway- and then gets flamed by the Randians posting to his review...
I'm going to go against the Groupthink here and state that a good movie could be made out of Atlas Shrugged- in fact a good movie could be made out of this actual movie's conceits- alternate reality 2016, where the Rail Roads are still the dominant means for transporting goods and people and government deliberately stifling creativity (shades of Harrison Bergeron). From everything I've heard and read this is not that movie.
The blogs posts in support by Randians is fascinating though- where exactly do these people think they'd end up in the pecking order of a world run by Atheistic Capitalist Technocrats?
wouldn't you expect people who went and saw the movie to already be predisposed to liking it? I mean the reviews I read by non-professional reviewers were almost all over the top anti-liberal posts more than they were about the quality of the movie.
cokes to 30, 27, 23,
I don't think many people have a problem with saying that it's possible, they may dislike the message but a good dystopian future story almost always goes with a simplistic political plot as the cause of that future and that the hero is to go against that politics, it doesn't matter if you are dealing with socialism, fascism, anarchism or anything else. Nobody with a brain really believes that the ultimate result of liberalism is the death of individuality/exceptionalism.
I haven't seen Atlas Shrugged and don't plan to, but Ebert's reviews of "political" movies generally track pretty closely with how much he agrees with its message.
It's a bit like the televised poker boom of five years ago. For awhile, there was no better property, and nothing would have been too much for television networks to pay for rights. Now it's faded back to where it always was - a niche event serving an extremely small number of diehard people.
Do you have any good examples?
I agree. Atlas Shrugged is basically two almost wholly separate pieces intertwined. One is a basic anti-hero action story. It's not terribly well written, but as a movie could work pretty well. The other is a political essay dressed up as a conversation and it is, from my libertarian POV, awful. Badly written and rambling. I may agree with many of her points politically but as a piece of writing, it's got a lot of problems.
It boils down to this: it's better to show than tell. If you must tell, do so in as brief and coherent manner as possible. She fails on both points.
If you strip the story of outright political lecturing and just stick to the action bit, a good movie could be made that still makes the basic points she wanted to make. A lot of people would disagree with those points but that is true of any piece that is so distinctly partisan. But they might still be entertained. No one will be entertained having their political opponents lecture them and no one should be entertained by having their political sympathizers lecture them.
Anyway, I imagine I'm their target audience and I have zero interest in paying to see this film based on what I've seen and read about it.
Four stars for W; I don't think Michael Moore's ever gotten less than three and a half stars.
On the other hand, he also gave Passion of the Christ four stars, and there was a minor scandal a year or so ago when he panned a "gay" movie, so I withdraw the comment.
To which the creatives could say "We were coddled and lulled into a false sense of security by copyright laws!"
I didn't understand the consistent love for W, there were some good bits in it, but the acting really did suck, reminded me of SNL level of acting, and it was a pretty simplistic view of the characters. (and anyone who gives Michael Moore a 3 star or better rating should be forced to watch back to back episodes of Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh until they finally admit he's just as big of a liar as they are)
There's a movie there. You'd just have to significantly re-write the novel, scrap the dialogue, give the characters at least some tiny bit of nuance, strip out as much of Rand's bizarre psychosexual fantasies as you can - well, there's a case for leaving in the real crazy - but there's a movie there. It just can't be made by anyone who loves the books. It would almost certainly have to be made by an actual rightist, but someone who doesn't worship Rand, who'd be able to see the kernel of a good movie trapped under all the terribleness in that novel.
The director was directing his first movie ever. You may him as the dad on "One Tree Hill" or "John Sears" for you 90210 fans.
Actually, I was pretty old when I read Atlas Shrugged... probably didn't read it until at least junior/senior year of college, maybe even well into graduate school or afterwards. I was definitely well out of my formative teen years. I just found Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart to be remarkably fascinating characters. I thought Galt came off as a smarmy jerk and *likely unnecessary spoiler alert* I thought the way that Galt took Reardon's place as the object of Taggart's affection was completely out of character for those two and it almost spoiled the whole text for me. It was almost as if Galt was purposefully written to be a completely unlikeable Jesus figure, except that Rand menat it in the totally opposite way. Just goes to show how poor of a writer she was... even when she had a great idea, she basically ruined it in order to make an insane political point.
But Reardon and Dagny Taggart are still two of my favorite book characters of all time. Flawed, but undaunted and always passionate about your *one thing* (no matter what it is)... basically the best any human can hope to manage in our general condition. From the trailer (and even the negative reviews), it looks like Bowler hit Reardon out of the park, which makes me almost want to see this.
I was curious, so I went ahead and checked:
Capitalism: A Love Story, 3.5
Sicko, 3.5
Farenheit 9/11, 3.5
Bowling for Columbine, 3.5
The Big One, 3
Roger & Me, 4
So it looks like only one review of a Moore film under 3.5. That said, Ebert tends to grade documentaries of all sorts a bit higher than the average reviewer, in my experience, and it looks like he's only written reviews on the better parts of Moore's canon - I couldn't find an Ebert-written review for Slacker Uprising or Canadian Bacon, pretty inarguably his two weakest films. Ebert and Gene Siskel did review Canadian Bacon on their TV program (posted on YouTube here - Ebert's commentary starts at 1:44). Ebert says that the film "just doesn't work", and both give it thumbs down. So there's that.
Speaking of which, An Inconvenient Truth also got four stars from Ebert.
another alternative of watching a Michael Moore film is to view Manufacturing Dissent to get a balanced viewpoint from Canadian filmmakers. The movie was planned as an homage to Moore and became an expose of the paranoid meglomaniac.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/dissent.html
I'm as big a liberal tree-hugger as you will find, but god that was an awful movie.
So, you're telling me Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard didn't write 7 of the 10 greatest novels of all time?
That was Elvis Mitchell's review of Across the Universe. I still haven't forgiven him for that. You're a critic! Do your job.
and anyone who gives Michael Moore a 3 star or better rating should be forced to watch back to back episodes of Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh until they finally admit he's just as big of a liar as they are)
I watched Canadian Bacon not a week ago and it remains hilarious, at least up until the end.
I couldn't find an Ebert-written review for Slacker Uprising or Canadian Bacon, pretty inarguably his two weakest films.
Farenheit 9/11 was terrible. I was vehemently opposed to the war and a total circle jerk liberal at the time (now I'm a more cynical liberal!) and I still felt like I was being lied to and lectured at during that movie. That movie is completely subverted by its dishonesty. I haven't seen many of his movies in their entirety but that one was by far the worst.
I've kicked around watching Capitalism: A Love Story, but I don't see a reason to expect anything more from him now. I am guessing I can get the same content from a random sampling of the NYTimes.com editorial page.
I think I liked it better than you did, but I never have to see it again. Four stars?
For those of you who didn't quick the link here is the top ten best novels of the twentieth century according to the readers. Awesome.
#1 ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
#2 THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
#3 BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
#4 THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
#5 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
#6 1984 by George Orwell
#7 ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
#8 WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
#9 MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
#10 FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard
[Edit] Coke to Snapper.
As others have said, it's because of the fan boys. Look at the user reviews at Metacritic: lots of fan boys giving it a 10 out of 10, some even saying they gave it 10 to balance out the 1s. And then there's this:
"As I write, "Atlas Shrugged" has a ???? rating from my readers. The film has not yet been seen publicly."
Say what you want about Ebert but when a movie is getting four star reviews by people who haven't seen it, you can completely ignore the fan ratings. All the critic reviews are basically "forget about the political themes: the direction, the acting, the dialogue, the script and the production values all suck." The trailer alone shows that it's pretty bad from a technical standpoint. It's a low budget movie made by a first time director with relatively unknown actors, based off a book that got poor reviews. It's no surprise it's getting panned.
Or, just shows how nuts she was- Galt AS WRITTEN was likable to HER.
Or another theory: One of my co-workers is a Republican leaning Libertarian - who hates Ayn Rand, and claims (and I'm not sure he's joking) that Rand was a Bolshevik plant whose job was to discredit libertarianism- he claims her completely out of date (even for the 1950s) conception of heavy industry and the economic roll it played - matched the same beliefs the Soviets had in the 20s and 30s regarding such industries. Her "heroes" tended to parallel the villains in Soviet fiction in both roles and personalities. Galt and every other Randian "heros" were supposed to be insufferable pricks/borderline sociopaths in order to discredit the beliefs espoused by such characters.
My personal opinion is that NO ONE in Rand's works comes across as remotely likable- the villains (the looters and moochers) who are supposed to be unlikable are unlikable and wholly without any redeeming qualities, the heroes who are supposed to be admirable, even if not likable in a warm and fuzzy sense, are equally unlikable- but are the types who keep the trains running on time (In the Mussolini sense)- my sense is that Rand's impression of Humanity was truly horrific- and that Rand herself was the very definition of a troll (and I mean that in a dwells under the bridge sense)- she's someone who would have been routing for the Orcs in the LOTR trilogy (little buggers were industrious afterall)
If I am in NYC for the 28th, I am in. Whether I am in the area or not is a total toss up at this point.
This sounds exactly like Star Wars, which did alright (though I don't think it does hold up as a film, really) - afaict, the book/movie are both by Lucas and produced simultaneously, the book coming out first.
#11 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss
Had no idea this L. Ron Hubbard was such a terrific writer. Somehow I feel the need..no, the duty.....to check out those novels, and to learn more about his philosophies.
I guess you can't discount it. This is the same woman, after all, who was waxing rhapsodic in her journal during her 20s about the superior nature of kidnapper, child-killer, and all-around sociopath William Hickman.
there's actually some truth to this - not that she was a secret Fifth Columnist, but everything I've read about Rand suggests that she was obsessed with the Soviets (who had driven her family out of Russia) and thought of her philosophy as an antidote to Marxism. Of course, because she was trying to play the Soviets' game, she ended up producing a similarly ugly, cruel view of humanity.
If that's true, then the production company execs are pretty stupid. They (purportedly) spend $20m on this film. If all they wanted to do was maintain their rights, they could've shot a cheap ashcan film (a film never intended for release, made on a shoestring budget). The Roger Corman Fantastic Four film is an example of this.
From everything I've read, they really wanted this movie made. They originally tried to get all kinds of name actors, etc. connected to it, but all these deals fell apart.
Dude you're gonna love the Battlefield Earth movie too.
Quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever seen on screen. It deftly avoids the problem of plot holes by not having any coherent plotting at all.
I can actually sympathize with the first part of that sentiment, and I often have the same impression (and I think of how this story on the news feed is surrounded by two reveling in their condemnation of Mr. Barrold Bonds). However to suggest that the majority of people judging Hickman are harboring "worse sins" than kidnapping and child-murder is bat-sh*t insane.
All I need to know from a critic is
1. Whether they liked a thing; and
2. Why.
Most critics are good at the first part, and terrible at the second part. One thing I like about Ebert's writing: he's pretty darn good at the second part.
I still want to see the movie, but based upon the reviews (some of the reviews at Reason were more positive than Loder's), it's more for the fact of its existence than for its quality.
Of such things are Netflix subscriptions made.
How in the hell did those pinkos Lee and Orwell ever manage to slip in there?
It's also worth keeping in mind that by Hickman's own account, the 12-year-old he killed was still alive when he started to cut off her limbs.
After Hickman was arrested, he said, "What is good for me is right." Rand described that sentiment as "the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard."
If it's an accurate expression of her beliefs, why does the intended audience matter?
It's an extraordinary piece of anti-writing, in which the author seems to forget that she's meant to be writing a book, and instead reverts to a five-year-old making up nonsensical stories for the Matchbox cars they are throwing across the room.
Having said that, I quite enjoyed 'Fountainhead' in parts. It somehow made a little more sense for these rants to be on the aesthetic side of the cultural debate, where I expect the author lean on the scales (though that hardly covers what Rand does, of course). It probably helps that I have a slight weakness for the aggressively modern/brutalist school of architecture, at least in concept.
Film sounds awful, rabid fans borg online poll without seeing it. Imagine everyone's surprise.
The fact that it was written for herself makes it worse IMO.
You don't love the 57 page rant about why people like her are superior to everyone else?
Well sure, who doesn't?
Agreed. When people tell me they liked Across the Universe, I can't even be polite about disagreeing with them.
All I need to know from a critic is
1. Whether they liked a thing; and
2. Why.
Most critics are good at the first part, and terrible at the second part. One thing I like about Ebert's writing: he's pretty darn good at the second part.
I agree and I think generally the NYTimes critics do a good job of that too. I like A.O. Scott a lot for this reason, and Stephen Holden to a lesser degree. I don't like Manohla Darghis (talk about a buzz kill) but at least she (?) does write enough that I can tell whether I would like the movie or not.
I think I stopped reading Ebert simply because our tastes didn't match up (loved Spanglish, hated District 9, etc.). Not that Scott is a perfect match (I'm still getting crap from the wife for Astronaut Farmer), but I think I line up with him better. But yeah, if a critic does a good job explaining why he feels the way he did about a movie, that's all you can ask.
That is all.
Actually "Fear" is not terrible, also not on the list is "Final Blackout," also not terrible...
Before L Ron decided to get rich by inventing his own religion and becoming areal life James Bond style villain (see: Sea Org.) he was actually a perfectly cromulent pulp fiction author.
Many 19th Century political "philosophers" (and some 20th century ones) seemingly have an almost visceral fear of the "mob" and of "mob rule," a fear that seemingly led straight to Fascism, Communism and other forms of totalitarian rule- it's interesting that Rand who seemingly sought a philosophy that was 180 degrees away from totalitarianism in all respects- seemed to harbor that same visceral fear/hatred.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main