Atlas Shrugged: The Musical

An angry defense of Pierce Brosnan's vocals in Mamma Mia!, from ABBA singer Benny Anderson:

"Everybody complains that Pierce can't sing and it p****s me off. I think he has a great voice. He couldn't sing 'Nessun Dorma' but neither could I - and I was in ABBA. "It's like saying Bob Dylan can't sing. It's just not fair. He has a good voice."

I saw yet another preview on The Daily Show, and you know what?

Pierce Brosnan can't sing. With all possible respect for the guy, who is one of everyone's two favorite James Bonds, who I've enjoyed in every movie I've ever seen him in, there was no harmony at all. It was like a bull walrus trying to warn his mate of an approaching polar bear, and I'm concerned that it might compromise the structural integrity of some older theaters.

The 61-year-old Swede also revealed how Catherine Johnson's script for the musical - which raked in a phenomenal £1 billion worldwide as a theatre production before being adapted for the big screen - convinced the band to allow their tracks to be used.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Update: Via a reader, behold:


...also, from one of the cruelest reviews yet:

The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take "Mamma Mia!" to be a useful contribution to that debate....I thought that Pierce Brosnan had been dragged to the edge of endurance by North Korean sadists in his final Bond film, "Die Another Day," but that was a quick tickle with a feather duster compared with the agony of singing Abba's "S.O.S." to Meryl Streep through a kitchen window. Somebody, either a cheeky Swede or another North Korean, has deliberately scored the number a tone and a half too high, with visible results: swelling muscles along the jawline, tightened throat, a panicky bulge in the eyes.

Sometimes, Hollywood gives you a movie you don't even need to go see to mock mercilessly.

The Dark Knight

Just got back from the theater, evening showings are still selling out here. The Dark Knight is highly recommended: with only a couple of minor missteps, the film is dark, gritty, and everything you'd expect after Batman Begins, if not more. It feels more like a tense crime drama than a superhero movie, and the story is even more plainly driven by philosophical struggle than Batman Begins, with a number of scenes that wouldn't feel out of place in an Ayn Rand novel: "fairness" is a tool for rationalizing evil, the law is incapable of defining justice, the rejection of reason is a symptom of madness, and well-intentioned utilitarians, driven by fear, threaten to undo the (frankly Randian) good.

...and yes, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is every bit as deeply twisted and amazing as people say it is. I'm tempted to say that the movie could've just been two straight hours of him delivering a disturbing monologue and fidgeting with a knife and still been a hit.

At The Movies

Last night, I made the horrible mistake of getting 10,000 B.C. on pay-per-view.

This film is bad. Within fifteen minutes, I felt like I would've preferred sitting through Springtime for Hitler. Every line is ridiculous (they don't have a separate word for snow, calling it "white rain"), and either the neolithic era was one of unprecedented racial diversity, or walking from Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa is something that can be casually described as taking "many days", since the proto-European hero, D'Leh, whose people are identified by wearing their hair in dreads, leads what appear to be the combined armies of the ancestors of the Zulus, Nubians and Ethiopians against some kind of Egyptian/Babylonian cult led by a group of murderous, pyramid-building Tibetans who wield technology a good 7,000 years ahead of the period, explained away by the implication that they came from Atlantis.

People magically come back to life after receiving mortal wounds, because if they didn't, it'd ruin the alleged "plot". A sabre-tooth tiger spares D'Leh, in thanks for once having freed it from a trap. Dinosaurs are too cliched, so D'Leh is instead attacked by (already extinct) terror birds, oversized, tree-climbing, man-eating ostriches. Every death scene is hilarious, and at 45 minutes, I quit caring what happened to the characters. Instead, I hoped for some cavegirl skin, only to have my hopes further dashed when the credits rolled with D'Leh's climactic discovery of corn, which I can only assume his people called "maize".

Never before have I seen people work so hard to assemble such an elaborate pile of crap, which they clearly took completely seriously. According to Wikipedia, the director (who brought you The Day After Tomorrow) used unknowns (but somehow, got Omar Sharif to narrate, proving that Sharif's career is truly over) because, in his own words, "if like, Jake Gyllenhaal turned up in a movie like this, everybody would be, 'What's that?'"

Apparently, he feared that familiar faces would ruin the "realistic" prehistoric setting.

I'm not kidding.

On the other hand, had he hired successful actors, his film might've contained what industry insiders refer to as "acting".

So, feeling the need to cleanse my palette, I tried to catch the midnight premier of The Dark Knight tonight. Once I got past the three guys dressed as the Joker having a smoke out front, the cashier told me they were sold out.

"Uh, I know it's midnight, but is there an alternative?"

"Mamma Mia!. We have lots of seats for Mamma Mia!."

Of course they do. Based on the previews I've seen, the film synopsis goes something like this:

The story of a spoiled, wealthy English girl's delightful discovery that her mother used to have unprotected sex with multiple partners, leaving her with three potential fathers, all of whom she will now confront in the most awkward manner possible. Told through the awful music of 1970s Swedish dance band ABBA, as sung by Pierce Brosnan.

It sounds about as much fun as being strangled to death with a pink feather boa. I went home.

Speaking of World in Conflict, for those who play it, an expansion pack is due out in the fall, Soviet Assault. Like all the other trailers Massive has made for this game, these are really impressive, and since the initial release was as great as the trailers implied, I suspect the expansion will be excellent, as well.



World in Conflict has been such a success partly because of the detailed art and accessible gameplay, but also because Massive Entertainment had a solid grasp of the nostalgia and surrealism inherent in the concept. They were able to milk it for all it's worth to construct both the game's look-and-feel and the campaign mode storyline, producing bits like a firefight in a Burger King parking lot, a jungle warfare scene that turns out to be in front of palm trees in a mall, and Spetsnaz taking over New York Harbor. Alec Baldwin doing the narration makes it impossible to avoid subconsciously associating it with The Hunt For Red October, and the Tears for Fears trailer was inspired. It was great marketing for a great idea.

The imagery of Soviet APCs pouring through the Berlin Wall and Hinds over Paris suggests they're really keeping that going for the expansion. All the new maps for Soviet Assault will be made available for multiplayer battles free of charge, it's the Soviet missions that will be retail-only. If you like strategy games and haven't picked up World in Conflict yet, it's great for your library, with a lot of replay value.

Speed Failure

The last few years have seen a string of films with awkward leftist messages turn into humiliating box office failures, while "controversial" war epics like 300 and films with overtly libertarian conservative social messages like Batman Begins prove to be smash hits. Hollywood was excited about Stop Loss, Rendition, and Lions for Lambs as well as numerous others, but all were disasters. The latest victim of the disconnect between the Hollywood establishment and their audience, surprisingly, is Speed Racer.

Consider this summary by blogger "Ryan":

For me, sunk deep in the adrenaline rushes and the cheesy dialogue, was a great resonating story. The character called Royalton is the main enemy in the film. He owns a huge corporation, Royalton Industries, and tries to get Speed and Racer Inc. to join with him and be sponsored...The character of Royalton almost seems like a very cartoonish version of today's corporate leaders, but then you realize it is not such a far fetched portrayal. Royalton talked about special deals that were being made to fix races so that certain corporations could raise their stocks, in the end only concerned about themselves and more money.

There is a scene in the movie where Royalton fraudulently accuses Racer Inc of cheating, making Racer Inc. lose credibility to the public's eye. The media then writes in papers about "Racer Inc., a family of cheaters". Speed points to the article and says, "There has got to be something we can do about this." Pops replies, "We can't, corporations control the media." HOW fucking true is that statement? Very in today's world. The people are controlled by what the media tells them, and the corporations control what the media tells the people.

Apparently, it wasn't true enough to stop the film from being made, something that "the corporations" never would've allowed if they'd known what was good for their money, since Speed Racer is a colossal failure, struggling to match a generic Cameron Diaz romantic comedy.

The winner? Iron Man, a film about a billionaire industrialist and arms manufacturer who becomes a force for good in the world when he creates a high-tech war machine so that he can personally crush both the Islamists who abducted him and a corrupt colleague who is trying to undermine him.


I submit to you that the problem is not, as an unnamed studio source reportedly claimed, that "no one wants to see Iraq war movies", but rather that few people actually share the deliriously leftist worldview being pushed in those films.

If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to check out Iron Man this weekend. I saw it last weekend, and it is absolutely worth seeing on the big screen.

There Will Be Blood

Went to see this tonight, and, unbelievably, it's actually a very well-done, original movie. It's also not at all what you expect from the trailers, which really seemed to be billing a horror film. It's certainly got a share of violence, but it's more of a black comedy than anything else, and is worth seeing in theaters, if you haven't already. It has an odd, slightly unwieldy feeling to it that makes it seem older than it is, and Daniel Day-Lewis is outstanding in his role. Some of the lines may well outlive the film. In fact, New York Magazine respectfully asks that you not turn the phrase "I drink your milkshake!" into the new "Show me the money!"

Just remember, at the end, when the music plays, and the audience is sitting there in horrified silence, unable to believe that this is actually how the film ends, be the guy who points at the screen and yells "THAT'S GOING TO BE ME SOMEDAY!"

Also, saw a trailer for Defiance, which looks very promising film, about Jewish partisans who organized to resist the Nazis in Eastern Europe. They cast Daniel Craig in a role where he actually looks like he fits in, as opposed to his very depressing Bond:

I need to start wearing a headband.

Saw the new Rambo last night. Surprisingly, it was pretty good, by which I mean it was a Rambo movie incorporating the kind of advances you'd expect in a modern action movie, rather than some politically corrected attempt to "reimagine" Rambo.

The scene which featured the movie's catchphrase seemed like it was awkwardly missing a line of dialogue and his duffel bag is in surprisingly good shape considering it was issued to him in the Vietnam War, but for a gritty action movie (they wrap it up in a tidy 90 minutes but cram in combat more intense than Black Hawk Down), it's worth checking out. At one point, even once the sound of the explosion itself died down, every guy in the theater was still laughing.

Girlfriends, on the other hand, may be less enthused. On the way out, I heard one complaining that they "should've gone to see 27 Dresses." That's all the more reason to make sure she goes with you.

Update: The Burmese junta, by the way, is very displeased with the film.

Police in Burma have given DVD hawkers strict orders not to stock the new Rambo movie, which features the Vietnam War veteran taking on the former Burma's ruling military junta, a Rangoon resident said.

Despite the prohibition, pirated copies of the movie are widely available on the streets of the former capital, where it is fast becoming a talking point among a population eager to shake off 45 years of military rule.

"People are going crazy with the quote 'Live for nothing, die for something'," one resident said, referring to the tagline of the fourth Rambo instalment, which opened in the United States this week.

"This movie could fuel the sentiment of Myanmar [Burma] people to invite American troops to help save them from the junta," one Rangoon resident said via e-mail.

Heh.

Everything is 9/11, Speculative Analysis is Crap: A Counter-Review of 'Cloverfield'

Earlier this year, I went over the blatant insanity revolving around the release of the film 300, with Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers like AlterNet's Steve Burgess and Slate's Dana Stevens having thoroughly convinced themselves that the film's release was a propaganda tool designed to lead us into a war with Iran. Burgess compared the film to Triumph of the Will and expressed his confusion at why the Greeks wanted to repel the invading army (an interesting insight into his politics), while Stevens, apparently tapping into some sort of alternate dimension consisting of pure hysteria, not only referenced The Eternal Jew, but claimed that the film defamed elephants, lesbians, and the disfigured by associating them with the Persians. Neither of these beetle-heads seemed concerned that the "graphic novel" on which 300 was based had been released years before 9/11, that the film was created to be nothing if not faithful to the original work, and that it was all based on the story of a confrontation between ancient Iran and the West which did, in fact, happen thousands of years before the existence of Islam.

Stevens, it turns out, is still be paid to go to the movies, woe unto the clerk who sold her a ticket to Cloverfield. The sad thing is that while I haven't even seen the movie yet, and fully expect it to be as bad as monster movies always are (that's what makes them good), I don't need to. The problems with this review scream right off the page, with Stevens once again referencing her political frustrations before the first paragraph ends.

The concept: A monster takes Manhattan, Godzilla-style (or maybe al-Qaida-style, but we'll get to that in a second). Instead of witnessing the havoc from the traditional omniscient point of view, we see everything in real time from a handheld camcorder, wielded by a group of panicked kids fleeing the beast. It's The Blair Witch Project all over again, complete with the logic holes (at what point does recording your life become more important than running for it?) and Handycam-induced nausea.

You know, that's a good question. At what point do people in grave danger come to their senses and run for their lives? I suppose we could ask any of the hundreds of people who stand there filming as tornadoes bear down on their homes every year, or people who stood in the path of the 2004 tsunami with their cameras rolling. In fact, people do this all the time. This isn't a "logic hole", it's exactly what you'd expect to see. In any case, cut past some snide remarks to the meat of the madness:

As the Statue of Liberty's head lands in the middle of a screaming crowd, the Woolworth building collapses in a cloud of dust - the most direct 9/11 reference I've seen in a movie that wasn't explicitly about the attacks.

I won't reveal in detail the fate of the six partygoers who flee, spangled dresses and all, through the panicked streets toward a military evacuation site (though I will note that their fates are more varied and unpredictable than in most movies of this type). I'm more interested in how Cloverfield plays on 9/11 anxieties - not in the way one "plays out" issues in therapy, but in the way one plays a video game. 2008 has already seen a notable uptick in America's historical eagerness to eradicate New York in our imagination. Besides Cloverfield and I Am Legend, there's the upcoming History Channel special Life After People, whose ubiquitous poster shows a crumbling Brooklyn Bridge overgrown with vines. As this fine piece in the Guardian points out, Americans seem almost soothed by replaying the fantasy of our flagship city in ruins. What's that about?

In a quote from the press notes, Abrams says, "We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is about something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe." Cloverfield's entertainment value remains to be determined over its opening weekend. For viewers in the same demographic as Rob and his buddies, I suspect it will be a big hit. But maybe its re-imagining of 9/11 as the ultimate buzzkill is a little too safe. The movie may be the first to repackage the events of Sept. 11 as pure entertainment. It's certainly the first to use those events as part of a viral marketing hook, in a spooky untitled trailer that premiered before last summer's Transformers. Whoa, that would be intense, if lower Manhattan was suddenly destroyed by some terrible, faceless agent of evil. Oh, wait.

Stevens seems absolutely bent on the idea that Cloverfield is, quite literally, not simply a monster movie that evokes 9/11, but, in fact, about 9/11. Sure, and Snakes on a Plane is actually about United Airlines Flight 93. If True Lies, a film about Islamist terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, were released today, instead of in 1994, Stevens would call it a manifestation of 9/11 and our paranoia about Islamist terror. She's the Rudy Giuliani of film reviewers.

In real life, Hollywood would most likely be afraid to release the film, for fear of the political backlash from, well, from people who read Dana Stevens reviews. As the great Mark Steyn noted, when Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was released in 2002, Hollywood had neatly cropped out the Islamists, and replaced them with politically-correct enemies - neo-Nazis.

Imagine it's 1943, you're at a Warner Bros script meeting about Casablanca, and Jack Warner says: "I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we re-set it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?"

Stevens is looking increasingly detached from reality, here. The Cloverfield scene with the head of the Statue of Liberty landing in the street? A direct and obvious homage to Escape From New York. You remember that movie? From 1981, two decades before 9/11?

A single exception, of course, doesn't invalidate her larger point, but the fact is that 9/11 was a disaster so vast in scope that virtually any misfortune that occurs in New York City, to people in a skyscraper, or to anyone in any city anywhere can be twisted into some kind of a metaphor for 9/11. Aircraft hijacking? 9/11. Burning building? 9/11. Subway tunnel collapse? 9/11. Stock market crash? 9/11. Your flight's cancelled and you have to wait at the airport? Oh. My. God. 9/11!

It's not just Escape From New York, either. There's no shortage of films about utter destruction and mayhem in New York City, and much of it cannot be a metaphor for 9/11, because the films containing the scenes were made well before it ever happened. Deep Impact and Independence Day put it right on their posters, just to make certain we see it.

 
One can't escape the conclusion that if the original Planet of the Apes were released today, Stevens would, seeing the legendary final scene with the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, jump out of her chair and proclaim that the entire film was a metaphor for 9/11, and that the apes were therefore some racist interpretation of Muslims. Cloverfield is not "the first to repackage the events of Sept. 11 as pure entertainment", it's merely one of the first films since 9/11 that decided not to tapdance around that kind of imagery.

The "fine" Guardian article Stevens references, authored by Shane Danielsen, is a victim of this flawed reasoning.

Watching it, you're struck by how American cinema is still struggling to process the events of 9/11. Oliver Stone's World Trade Centre was a creditable effort but this, despite its genre trappings, is probably the definitive filmic take on the attack on Manhattan so far...The visual cues are hardly subtle ones: in the shadowy distance the Chrysler Building collapses upon itself like a sandcastle; the streets are engulfed in clouds of dust; reams of paper flutter earthwards from the exposed shells of skyscrapers.

Using this method, we may as well be talking about the destruction at Nakitomi Plaza in Die Hard. Simpler explanation: That's just what it looks like when a building is destroyed. There are only so many ways for buildings to blow up and/or fall down, and they're all going to look quite a lot like 9/11, just as any urban firefight is to going to resemble the ones we hear about in Iraq, because, as a rule, groups of soldiers emptying automatic weapons at a target all tend to look more or less alike.

Sadly, even the central thesis of the Guardian article, another point on which Stevens leans heavily, falls flat.

But America also has its destruction myth, inevitably set in New York, whose reduction to rubble both confirms that city's pre-eminence and signals that the stakes are high. The spectacle of NY landmarks (the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building) being totalled is as much a recurring obsession for American filmmakers as among the higher echelons of al-Qaida. I can't recall another culture - even the Sumerians, no strangers to fatalism - which has rehearsed its own extinction with such apparent relish.

In fact, I was quite surprised. I set out writing this assuming that this theory would hold true, but rifling through lists of various disaster movies, I'm startled at how many are set in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities. Some highly apocalyptic films, like Children of Men, and that terrible one with the dragons, whose name I can't recall, are set right in merry old England. V for Vendetta, of course, culminates in a 9/11-like scene of Parliament itself being destroyed. (What are we rehearsing there?) The most prominent films featuring the destruction of New York City don't neglect to take (or at least threaten to take) the rest of the world with them: Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, for example.

If New York City isn't overrepresented in disaster films, then perhaps it's just that scenes of the destruction of Manhattan are the ones we find most memorable, because it's the skyline we're most familiar with. As the effective capital of the planet and the largest city in the most wealthy and powerful nation that's ever existed in all of human history, New York City is naturally the most popular site for, not just American disaster movies, but American movies, period. I suspect that the the biggest offenders in this department are not films about apocalyptic disasters, but rather romantic comedies.

Don't believe me? Guys, go ahead. See how many romantic comedies you can name off the top of your head that aren't set in the five boroughs. (Women have an unfair advantage in this contest, in that they may actually watch romantic comedies.) I can name three (and naming all three Father of the Bride movies doesn't count), and my family owned a video rental store, for God's sake.

It's almost as if we're soothed by replaying some kind of fantasy, set in our flagship city. Oh, wait.

For bonus crazy: Religion Dispatches' Gabriel McKee takes it in another direction entirely.

Many reviewers have made the obvious connection to 9/11, and it's certainly true that the monster's initial rampage eerily evokes that day's images. But there's a deeper level to it. At one point, the characters are caught in the middle of a firefight between the monster and a National Guard regiment. Make no mistake: this is a movie about the invisibility of the Iraq war.

Yeah, because it's not been on every news channel, every day, since the year before it began. It's invisible.

Update: Reader Kevin weighs in:

The "terrible one with the dragons" would be Reign of Fire, starring a pre-Batman Begins Christian Bale.

I should be ashamed that I know the answer. I should be even more ashamed that I actually own the DVD.

Yep, that's the one, with London burning on the cover. Says the Wikipedia entry, it "was considered only a modest failure".

Beowulf

Went to see Beowulf last night expecting to be disappointed, it was actually pretty clever once you realized what the filmmakers were trying to do in their portrayal of the character, which takes a little while to become clear. It's a great visual spectacle (CGI has come a long way, but still has a long way to go) and tells a unique version of the story. Without spoiling anything, in the epic poem, Beowulf does actually have to go back and behead Grendel, kill Grendel's mother, and eventually slay a dragon in an entirely unrelated event, which is why the characters are talking the way they are about his deeds at the end. What you see in the film is suggested to be the dark secret behind the legend. If you don't know the original poem, you'll probably miss the point they were trying to make about the nature of heroism, and some of the events and dialogue won't make as much sense as they should. It actually would've benefited from a longer runtime to make space for character development and a little elaboration of Beowulf's "traditional" image.

Personally, I would've liked to have seen a telling of the original story. It strained a great deal from a visible conflict between loyalty to the original epic story, the message of the filmmakers and the obvious pressure to create a "popular" movie, especially for young people (nevermind that it should've been rated "R"). Apparently, somebody in Hollywood thinks that audiences wouldn't be able to relate to a Beowulf that can resist nailing Angelina Jolie, even knowing the pairing will doubtlessly spawn another demonic, kingdom-smashing monster. Little "concessions" like Jolie's "high heels" are patronizing, and films like 300 and Batman Begins didn't need to stoop to that level to perform brilliantly at the box office.

Still, considering your other options lately, such as Lars and the Real Girl ("He introduces Bianca to his brother Gus and his wife Karen and they are stunned....because she is a life-size doll..."), Bee Movie ("Barry B. Benson is a...bee....who...discovers humans are mass consumers of honey and decides to sue the human race for stealing bees' honey."), Lions for Lambs ("Two determined students at a West Coast University...follow the inspiration of their idealistic professor..."), and Across the Universe ("A romantic musical told mainly through numerous Beatles songs..."), you could easily make a huge mistake with your $8, and Beowulf is a much more solid bet. Just expect Conan the Barbarian (or even Conan the Destroyer) rather than Braveheart, and don't assume that PG-13 means the content is actually acceptable for your 13 year-old: Things end quite badly for many of the characters, and the themes are plainly adult.

Also, I Am Legend actually looks like it's going to be excellent. Watch the trailer at the link, if you haven't seen it already.

World In Conflict

So, I finally picked up a copy of this game a week ago and have been playing for a few days. When I first saw it, I loved the novelty of reviving "Red Dawn"-era Cold War nostalgia for a war game, and it is, in a word, awesome. Is it as awesome as this gameplay trailer makes it appear?


Significantly more so, in fact. There is no tedious base building, it's squad-level tactical combat incorporating helicopters, armor, infantry, and support equipment along with simple field fortifications and the ability to call in artillery and air strikes. Unit balance and abilities are easy to understand, controls are intuitive (far more so than in the prerelease demo), but it manages to maintain an impressive level of tactical depth, and to give you enough of the distinctive flavor of Gulf War-era warfare that you find yourself deeply involved in the gameplay. Online multiplayer battles are fairly brief, but with good teams, intense (we're talking 15-20 minutes, as opposed to the three hour slogs a friendly game of "Rise of Nations" could easily turn into), and the campaign mode, narrated, oddly enough, by Alec Baldwin, is colored by a story arc developed by Larry Bond. Bits of music from Tears for Fears and Whitesnake, as well as Audioslave. A couple of the levels seem to drag a bit (the first half of Wasteland could've been told in a cutscene instead of played out), but overall, it's only slightly less addictive than, say, cocaine, and is well worth buying.

I splurged on the Collector's Edition, which actually includes a piece of the Berlin Wall. I thought that was amusing: When Taco Bell announced that they were putting a giant bullseye in the Pacific Ocean and would give every American a free taco if any piece of the Mir space station crashed into it, I took it as absolute proof of the victory of decadent capitalism: We were waiting for one of the Soviet Union's few really notable technological achievements to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so we could go eat. Now, the symbol of the absolute reign of Communism over eastern Europe is being packaged with our video games. No wonder Putin's so freaked out all the time.

Eastern Promises

I saw this movie tonight, pretty cool stuff. If you like Italian mafia movies, this Russian mafia film set in London is a good twist, even if the plot plods a bit. The warning, however, is that the movie is brutal and dark, with astoundingly graphic violence. Every time you think you've established a moral boundary the characters will not cross, the script buries your hopes like a Chinese coal miner. (Which is ironic, because being buried alive in a coal mine collapse is a metaphor used repeatedly for growing up in Russia.) You'll have to watch "The Departed" for a pick-me-up after this.

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

The New York Times, over an audible grumble, considers the influence of Ayn Rand:

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com's best-seller list. ("Winning," by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

One of Rand's most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of "The Fountainhead," a novel about an architect true to his principles....He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to "her moral defense of capitalism."

Rand's free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father's pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, "King of Kings."

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of "The Fountainhead" began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after "Atlas Shrugged" was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic's comment that "the book was written out of hate." Mr. Greenspan wrote: " 'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Rand called "Atlas" a mystery, "not about the murder of man's body, but about the murder - and rebirth - of man's spirit." It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce....Rand said she "set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them."

This is a bit of a simplification: Galt's strike isn't just against "government interference", but an abandonment of Greenspan's "parasites" by the ambitious and successful, to deny "the looters" the fruits of human reason and intellect that they wish to take by force. The tyranny of bureaucrats speaking on behalf of "society" is crucial to understanding the story. Either way, Rand's most famous novel has been described as the second most influential book in American culture, after the Holy Bible.

Those who don't agree with or understand Rand's core philosophy still have to appreciate that she is a unique figure in the modern era, standing firm in defense of what it means to be a human being, rather than an animal. Even Dr. Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, mourned the collapse of philosophy in Western civilization:

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge...However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers...Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!"

Rand's work, unlike so much of the postermodernist and deconstructionist claptrap that has taken hold among so many, is a consistent and profound defense of human intellect, rightly elevating the individual's power to reason and right to act accordingly over the perceived desires of a collective. It reintegrates the empirical world's concrete engineering and economics into the abstract world of ideas and values to help reveal the nature of objective reality, reasserting the crucial traditions of Western thought that built our civilization and made it great, that led us to the moral imperative of recognizing individual liberties. That's why her work has enjoyed such a significant role in distinguishing American ideals, and why the framework it establishes is such a powerful weapon for use in the war against sophistry, one which any honest conservative, libertarian, or capitalist should see themselves a part of. Some of the rather "radical" ideas Rand espoused in her time, like abolishing the FCC's "fairness doctrine", eventually came to pass, and today, the people who want to undo those changes are the ones accused of radicalism.

Of course, all those reasons are also why leftists hate her. Sadly, it's why even some preachers, especially those with inconsistent, vacuous theologies, decried her work even in her own life. Rand's own personal life, like anyone's, had flaws and failings, but separating the merits of ideas from the people talking about them is the purpose of consistent logic, and her reasoning led down a path that comes closer to a lot of key Christian philosophy than some would like to admit: Rand did not condemn charity, but rather insisted that it be recognized for the act of good will and kindness that it is rather than be imposed as a moral duty. Even Martin Luther dismissed the idea that Christians should give up what they've earned to those who have not as a mandate of Faith rather than an act of individual choice, in Against the Rebelling Peasants:

...the Gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who do of their own free will what the apostles and disciples did in Acts IV. They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others - of a Pilate and a Herod - should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, would have other men's goods common, and keep their own goods for themselves. Fine Christians these! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants.

Rand even argued both in her writings and to Playboy that, though she didn't recognize marriage as a sacred institution, sex without sincere, rational love was inherently immoral.

Regardless of that, ultimately, Rand held that happiness comes from living by your true values, and it should be obvious that nothing can prevent a man from living, by his own rational choice, for his God, except, of course, other people using force to stop him. That brings us full circle.

Oh well. Even if you want to write off all that, it's prety hard to avoid Ayn Rand's influence on the music of Rush and movies like The Incredibles and even, it's widely thought, Batman Begins. Feuding between Objectivists and other small government factions, including Libertarians, is hardly unknown, but whether you agree or not, Atlas Shrugged is certainly on the mandatory once-in-your-life reading life as a beneficiary of Western Civilization.

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." - Ayn Rand

A Heartwarming Coffee Table Book

It's called Armed America, by photographer Kyle Cassidy, who traveled America photographing gun owners in their homes.

I thought - or I should say, "I suspected" - that gun owners were going to be a lot more homogenous, because I really had no idea what I was going to find. I was surprised by the number of Democrats I met, and the number of people who didn't fit the stereotype in my head. There were definitely a lot of people I met who fit comfortably into that mold, but there were people like Mike, the chef, who wanted to shoot his own Thanksgiving turkey, and James, the older man who lost his vocal cords to cancer and got a gun because he felt vulnerable, realizing that he couldn't yell for help anymore, and Neil in New Jersey who had a functioning Civil War cannon - there were a lot of people I wasn’t expecting.

I wanted to tell something about who gun owners were, how they lived, and what their lives were like. I think the best way to get to the bottom of that in the limited canvas of a single photograph is to put them in the surrounding they've created for themselves - the things they live with every day, their quilts, books, and Hummel collections. I've seen plenty of photos of people shooting guns - open up any gun magazine and it's wall-to-wall photos of people outside shooting. Once you've seen a whole magazine of that, you pretty much have it covered. It doesn't really tell you anything about the person.

Throughout all of this, from sea to shining sea, I realized that the word "American" encompasses an enormous amount of diversity - not just racial and ethnic, which is the way that I think people typically use the word, but philosophical, cultural, and geographical. Two Americans, separated by a thousand miles (or, in some cases, as little as a hundred miles), may think, act, and live in ways that seem worlds apart. I think the best thing that came from this whole project was that I was able to get out of the bubble that I'd been living in for most of my life and have a look back from the outside. It's a much bigger world out there than I had ever imagined.

You can purchase the book at Amazon.

"Red Dawn"-Chic

With Putin in charge, this game is incredibly timely.

On November 9th, 1989 the Cold War was supposed to end...it didn't.

World in Conflict is the action strategy game where players defend their country, their hometown, and their families in the face of Soviet-led World War III, delivering an epic struggle of courage and retribution....This war isn't on television. It's on our soil and in our backyards.

The graphics look incredible, and the terrain deformation engine is impressive, especially considering that type of game is so line-of-sight dependent. It's massively multiplayer, but rather than being individual-level like Battlefield: 1942, is squad-based. I love the apparent incorporation of late 80's nostalgia, like the firefight in front of a vintage Burger King with a "Home of the Whopper" slogan and the trailer film set to Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants To Rule The World". Freakin' awesome.

Just try not to think of it as practice. Then again, Russia is pretty much still using the same equipment as they were in 1989.

"I heard gunfire and men shouting, I think they're Americans."

I finally went to see The Bourne Ultimatum tonight. Extremely cool movie, they had a lot of fun with it, with a nicely chaotic (if not perhaps needlessly exaggerated) Cops-style to the camera work. The segment of the film taking place in Manhattan was nicely done as well, because it actually felt personal and familiar to anyone who's walked the city, unlike many movie scenes set in New York City. I also thought that the method they used to incorporate the ending of Supremacy was very clever: It was woven in seamlessly enough that you really didn't sense a break in continuity at all in either film.

I've generally been pleased by the way that the Bourne movies don't descend into weird fantasizing about a government-wide or even party-wide conspiracy to do some grievous wrong to large numbers of people. (Anybody who imagines that kind of thing is plausible should ask themselves why hundreds of disparate officials can unite on the conspiracy theory in question, when they obviously can't unite on anything else at all, anywhere, ever.) Self-interest drives individuals, and the antagonists are figures with sinister interests that make them traitors and treasoners. That's what makes the story universally enjoyable: Bourne is a sympathetic figure to everyone, because he lacks a politicized agenda. In Ultimatum, that broke down a bit with some imagery and lines that were obvious references to contemporary issues, but it was pretty insignificant compared to, for example, the sheer idiocy of Jarhead or Shooter.

On the other hand, I still get bothered by things like the flash we're shown of Bourne bracing before a car crash by (it appeared) leaning over and wrapping the passenger-side seat belt around his arm, as though it was a life-saving move. (I'm not an expert on high speed impacts, but I don't think that's a useful thing to do under most circumstances. In fact, I'm almost certain you'd die. It's inevitably going to be the duty of someone with a sense of humor to edit the Bourne car chase scenes into a highway safety video for YouTube.) Still, it's a very exciting piece of work, and you have to be impressed at how they wedged a plot in there between the pauses in the running action sequence that is The Bourne Ultimatum.

Totally worth the ticket price. Of course, if I'd seen this poster before I'd left for Illinois in July, I could've had some mild Photoshop fun with it, like the old days.

Rhinestone Philosophy

Just to confirm: Musicians do not generally have good ideas.

"Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet," British newspaper The Sun quoted [Sir Elton John] as saying.

Sir Elton said the internet had "stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff", and it compelled them to "sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn't bode well for long-term artistic vision".

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span," he said.

"We're talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that's not going to happen with people blogging on the internet," Elton continued.

It is not clear whether his latest tirade was motivated by declining album sales due to internet piracy, although he has spoken out against the practice in the past.

Forget internet piracy: Until today I couldn't name a single Elton John album, but I suspect that few pirated his last album because, by all accounts, it sucked.

But in seeking to replicate the effect of their classic 1975 album Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy, John and Taupin have only succeeded in shining a spotlight on their own inadequacies. It sounds harsh, I know, but an album like The Captain & The Kid inspires a great deal of frustration on the part of a long-time fan. It's obvious they want to recapture what once came so easily to them, it's obvious they're hungry for the energy and motivation that once came so easily, but wishing for something and having it be so are two different things. Perhaps if the album had come without the expectations of being a sequel to one of their finest achievements it would have been easier to be accommodating - but no, it's a fairly mediocre album however you balance it. The overt comparisons to Captain Fantastic merely crystallize our complaint....If I had to guess I would say that both John and Taupin have gained some pretty bad habits from writing Broadway material.

Ouch, and that cruelty isn't even from a blogger.

When the album debuted, it took the Billboard at #18, with sales in the mid 40ks. Compare to Rush's Snakes & Arrows, an album from a band with an audience that, I would argue, is probably much more likely to be "blogging on the internet" or intimate enough with technology that they might routinely pirate music, which took #3 with sales well over 90k.

John's problem isn't that music is dying or that internet piracy is undermining his sales (there's even evidence of a correlation between downloading and improved sales, especially since many people who pirate music were not buying CDs before), it's that nobody's listening to his work. That, John seems to be implying, is a crime on the part of his audience, who are doing what they want to do, instead of listening to music in the correct "way" to support his "long-term artistic vision".

If this is the kind of publicity John wants for himself, it's more likely that the internet will shut him down for five years.

The Liberalverse: The Book

The key consequence of Liberalverse Theory is that hard left liberals are incapable of recognizing the real agenda of Islamists because they are too busy projecting their own onto them. Liberals want the West to comply with an elaborate theater of "international law" and handle international economic policy according to their worldview, so they convince themselves that Islamists would not try to kill us if we did, despite the Islamists having entirely different motives.

Now, Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, has written a handy guide to help clear things up for those so afflicted.

"Death to America!"

Years before September 11, our enemy warned us--and we weren't listening. We are being warned today--by enemies like Iran, North Korea, and radicals and terrorists across the globe--but we are still not listening.

Sounding the alarm is bestselling author Jed Babbin (former deputy undersecretary of defense), who exposes the demagogues, dictators, and death squads openly threatening America--with potentially devastating consequences, if we aren't alert to the danger.

Full of stunning detail, In the Words of Our Enemies reveals:

* What the Islamists themselves are saying about their plans for America--mass murder followed by imposition of Islamic sharia law

* How Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is leading a radical anti-American revolution that aims to organize the world's oil supplies against America

* Why China's plans go beyond regional hegemony to driving the United States out of the Pacific

* How even so-called "friendly" countries, like Russia, are conspiring against us

* How many countries have threatened to use nuclear weapons against America (it's more than you think)

Highlighting our enemies' own words, Jed Babbin gives you, the reader, an insider's intelligence report on the dangers we face. "In the Words of Our Enemies" gives you the knowledge you need to be forewarned and forearmed in defending America.

Babbin's premise, as explained tonight on The Daily Show, is that "we need to stop psychoanalyzing these characters and start listening to what they're saying", which addresses the main symptom of the Liberalverse problem. It looks like an interesting read.

Savvy?
I just got back from the new Pirates of the Caribbean. If you liked the first two, you should definitely see this one. The plot was a bit light on explanation at times, but the film was beautifully shot and a whole lot of fun.

The Leak
A clip of "Malignant Narcissism", an instrumental piece from Rush's upcoming Snakes and Arrows album, was on YouTube before the label caught up and pulled it. Now it's popping up all over the place. Geddy Lee is one of the faster and definitely among the most complex bassists around, and giving him a fretless bass for this song was... Well, it's short, but it's pretty incredible to listen to. Whatever's on YouTube for it, you can find it here.

Snakes & Arrows
Yes, it's true, Rush is releasing another album May 1st, and going on tour again. There's no way in hell I'm missing that.

A song from the album, Far Cry, has been released for radio play, and can be heard on the Rush website. It's awesome, harkens back to a lot of their earlier stuff, with the fat bass you expect from Geddy Lee driving the beat, and a great chorus that touches on Objectivist themes. I'm really looking forward to the album.