Guys read magazines with names like Guns & Ammo or Sports Afield or Rock and Ice to find out about new toys, better techniques, and where to go.

Girls read magazines like Self, about how to improve themselves in order to be more attractive to us. What a deal!

Gwyneth Paltrow, in the manner typical of celebrities, cranked out her own cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, and got right to work promoting her book with a cover shot, photo spread, recipes, and lifestyle tips in the May issue of Self.

You would think the ladies would be grateful for the inspirational advice, but Gwyneth’s somewhat self-congratulatory homily actually seems to have lit Ursula Hennessey’s fuse.

[C]heck out this article about Gwyneth Paltrow and her fitness. Or, I should say, her mommy fitness.

I’ve found what works for me. I know if I put in an hour and a half, five days a week, I’m good. If I’m on vacation and, like, “[Expletive] it, I’m not working out,” I know what to do when I get back. A lot of women think, “Oh, my God, I could never get there,” but I don’t think that’s true. It’s simply relative to how much you put into it.’

…’It’s not an accident. It’s not luck, it’s not fairy dust, it’s not good genes. It’s killing myself for an hour and a half five days a week, but what I get out of it is relative to what I put into it.

...’The reason that I can be 38 and have two kids and wear a bikini is because I work my [expletive] [expletive] off.’

Poppycock.

No fairy dust? Oh really, Gwynnie? How about the fairy dust of your birth? How about the neat coincidence of having Steven Spielberg for a godfather? How hard did you have to work for that?

How about the fact that you probably never have to vacuum your floors, Clorox your bathroom, or mingle with the plebes at Shop’nStop on Saturday mornings, with one whiny-walker and another sick toddler in the cart?

Lemme guess, Gwyn, you have a little babysitting help, right? Or do Moses and Apple just sit by, calmly sharing their toys and not getting on anybody’s nerves while you work out for an hour and a half, five days a week. What mother with young children, whether she works inside the home or out of it, has a spare 7-and-a-half hours per week for sweatin’ to the oldies? That’s a full work day.

The reason you can be 38 and have two kids and wear a bikini is because (and this is just a guess because I don’t know you personally) you’ve never worked all that hard to get to a place where there’s piles of money for your various whims, where everyone does all the “icky” things in life for you, and where you’re able to escape on said “vacation” any time you wish. Listen, Gwyneth, it’s perfectly okay to say, “I’m grateful for all the help I have. I’m thankful for the money to be able to pay trainers, babysitters, and housecleaners. I couldn’t be a 38-year-old bikini-wearin’ mum without that.” Let’s get real.

Is Gwyneth beautiful and admirably fit? Yes. Talented? Yes.

Successful because of blue collar hard work rather than fairy dust?

I think not.

Personally, I find Ursula’s rant amusing but a bit leftish.

Hank and Dagny ride in the engine on the first train run on the newly constructed John Galt Line.

Filming a classic novel with an intense following inevitably presents a formidable challenge. The mind’s eye of every reader has formed its own images of the key characters. Its readers will have read and re-read it again and again, and will remember the plot in intimate detail and will feel ill-used if any key scene, important event, or powerful line of dialogue should be omitted.

For an old-time right-wing Rand aficionado like myself, attending the film version of Atlas Shrugged in 2011 combined the sensation of attending church services on Christmas Eve with dropping by the kind of in-group convention one might attend in one’s capacity as a Science Fiction reader or war gamer, to take part in an event simultaneously providing the powerful and intense gratification of witnessing the cultural apotheosis of a book one deeply loves while also keeping one on the edge of one’s seat in suspense over the quality and accuracy of the re-creation.

Yesterday, we defied torrential rainstorms and drove over 40 miles into (what is referred to out here as) “occupied Virginia,” the New Jersey-like suburbs of the District, to a multiplex theater in Fairfax to see the film version of Atlas Shrugged on its second day.

The first issue, in the case of this kind of film, is inevitably casting. The two key roles in the first portion of Atlas Shrugged are Dagny Taggart and Henry Reardon, and in both cases I think the casting choices were superb.

Ayn Rand would have loved, one imagines, the choice of the blonde, angular, and intense Taylor Schilling for Dagny. Schilling is along the lines of a younger, American version of Kristin Scott-Thomas: beautiful in a decidedly challenging, aristocratic, and intelligent manner. I thought she portrayed Dagny Taggart’s Über-female combination of polished glamour and hoydenish tomboy indifference impeccably.

I have always had personal difficulties with picturing, or empathizing very successfully with, the great businessman Hank Reardon. Grant Bowler’s performance added the perfect note of ironic contempt in his interactions with the numerous villains surrounding him, which made the character work and come alive for me.

Michael Marsden’s James Taggart seemed perhaps a bit too young, and the choice of Iranian Navid Negahban for the nefarious Dr. Robert Stadler seemed peculiar, but in general the character actors playing the Rand villains did a bang up job. Michael Lerner’s Wesley Mouch and Armin Shimerman’s Dr. Potter were particularly fine.

The writer and production team all deserve a gold lighter and a life-time supply of dollar-sign cigarettes for plot accuracy and ideological fidelity. I was mentally comparing how faithful they were to the original here with Peter Jackson & company in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who felt no diffidence in “improving” on Tolkien with a less upright and chivalrous Faramir, a crude and slobbering Denethor, an extra near-death experience for Aragorn, and so on.

Working on an extremely limited independent production budget (rumored to have been as little as $7 million, the kind of money it takes to make a television documentary), Paul Johansson did a remarkable job. Hostile mainstream media critics were quick to notice, and snark over, the absence of James Cameron-level production values and a big name cast; but, let’s face it, there is an awfully big difference in what you can do with $200 million in 1997 and what you do with $7 million in 2010. I’d say that Johansson and company turned in results that were downright miraculous considering the limitations of their budget.

Ayn Rand directly challenged the established consensus of values of modern society, and struck at the heart of the ruling political ideologies of her time and ours. Naturally, the media establishment has always treated her work with hostility. 2011 has not been very different from 1957 in that respect.

Roger Ebert has not read the book, and obviously wouldn’t like if if he did.

I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.

During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, “What did they just say?” The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.

Maureen Dowd trashed the film for not having A-list stars, without even bothering to pretend to have seen it.

Tea Party groups are helping to market part one of a low-budget film version of “Atlas Shrugged,” with no stars and none of the campy panache of the Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal movie of “The Fountainhead.” “Atlas Shrugged” aptly opened on Tax Day, getting a rave from Sean Hannity, who said it wouldn’t have been released “had Hollywood liberals gotten their way,” and a dismissive shrug from most critics, even conservatives.

Personally, I would take Taylor Schilling over Angelina Jolie for Dagny any day. Brad Pitt ought to see if he can’t talk to the producers about trying out for the role of Ragnar Danneskjöld in Part 3.

Meanwhile, on Rotten Tomatoes, polling is currently running 85% to 10% in favor, an extremely positive rating.

Anthony Kaufman, in the Wall Street Journal, spoke to Executive Producer Harmon Kaslow, who thinks that the opinion of MSM critics will not prevent the film from making its own way.

Despite the dreadful weather, the new-fangled stadium theater was nearly full, and the audience applauded vigorously at the film’s close.

We expected that the critics would have a fear of embracing this film,” says Kaslow. “We knew that there was a substantial likelihood that they would not view the film as to whether we got the message right, but would look at it comparing it to what Hollywood would have done. I don’t think our audience is persuaded at all by those reviews.”

“It’s somewhat analogous to the family-based film market,” he continues. “Most family based films are not subject to review, because they know that that audience is all about the message. And if the message is right, they’ll give you a hall pass if the production values weren’t as high. And if we get criticized for the dialogue, most of it has been taken right out of the book. So, in a sense, they’re criticizing the literary nature of the work.”

Reason has a celebratory opening day article and link collection.

One recent day at Disneyland….

Hat tip to Leah Libresco.

University of York finds a surprisingly intact brain in Iron Age skull discovered during excavation for campus extension. Its original owner appears to have been sacrificed. Additional link Still more.
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Nude photo of 24-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, taken by Roddy McDowell, found in private collection.
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Nice wall tentacle, but $1100 is much too high a price.
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New search underway for missing Amber Room.
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British newspaper reports on Brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys) assault on 33 US states.
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Something on the order of 70 ancient lead codices were apparently discovered around five years ago in a cave in Jordan.

I’m a cinemaphile, and I cannot even identify the film that the above photo represents. I found few of her movies very interesting, and Elizabeth Taylor was never a fantasy girlfriend of mine. Her feminine personae were too old-fashioned and conventional, too guilty, and too campy. She always seemed to me to play roles embodying the notions about sexuality of my parent’s generation. I never even thought she could act particularly well until I saw her amazing performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her performance as Martha permanently changed my mind about her skills and abilities.

Her passing has clearly, however, provoked a deep response and many writers are pausing to contemplate her career and cultural significance.

Camille Paglia argues that Elizabeth Taylor was not only a better actress than Meryl Streep, that she was a “pagan goddess” who wielded “the world-disordering” sexual power of the eternal femme fatale. Quite a tribute.

Elizabeth Taylor’s importance as an actress was that she represented a kind of womanliness that is now completely impossible to find on the U.S. or U.K. screen. It was rooted in hormonal reality—the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct.

26 little-known facts about Elizabeth Taylor

How good looking was Elizabeth Taylor? Buzzfeed supplies 100 photographs so you can judge for yourself.

What happened to Francisco?

Pianist Lang Lang playing at the White House

Chairman Hu Jintao and the visiting Chinese delegation deliberately insulted the United States by arranging for a Chinese pianist to play a Korean War-era anti-US propaganda song in the White House.

Epoch Times:

Lang Lang the pianist says he chose it. Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain.”

The film depicts a group of “People’s Volunteer Army” soldiers who are first hemmed in at Shanganling (or Triangle Hill) and then, when reinforcements arrive, take up their rifles and counterattack the U.S. military “jackals.”

The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. CCP propaganda has always referred to the Korean War as the “movement to resist America and help [North] Korea.” The message of the propaganda is that the United States is an enemy—in fighting in the Korean War the United States’ real goal was said to be to invade and conquer China. The victory at Triangle Hill was promoted as a victory over imperialists.

The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” in the song is the United States.

Song segment from “Shang gan ling” [Battle of Triangle Hill] (1956)

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Claire Berlinski has the best response:

I know, I know, this morning I was fretting about nuclear war. But after reading this, I think it’s time to just flatten China completely. ...

Just flatten the whole Middle Kingdom. What do you say? So it would be the end of the world. At least we’d go down with honor.

Well, maybe Claire is being just a little extreme. But I do think a responsible American administration would make a point of teaching China a lesson by sinking the next Chinese naval vessel that decides to play war games with the US Navy, by swatting down hard immediately one of China’s naughty little surrogates in the Axis of Evil, by arranging to supply Taiwan with some extra special kind of advanced weaponry that China really really wouldn’t like, by hosting the Dalai Lama at the White House as soon as possible, and by making a seriously punitive change in the American economic relationship with China.

Taggart Tunnel through Continental Divide: Obama voters, Beware!

On December 7, 6:30 to 9:30 PM, at The Millennium Broadway Hotel, Hudson Theatre, 145 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036, purchasers of $100 to $500 tickets will get to drink cocktails, hobnob with the producers and cast of the Atlas Shrugged movie, receive an update on the film’s progress and watch a ten-minute preview film clip, including the film’s first scene.

Whit Stillman

If Whit Stillman were a blogger, I believe he’d be a contributor at Maggie’s Farm.

Ivy League conservatives rejoiced twenty years ago when Metropolitan opened in the art houses. Here, at last, was a directorial voice speaking for us, someone sharing our appreciation for the surviving remnants of the belle monde, a sophisticated storyteller focused on the lifestyles of urban haute bourgeoisie of old family and private school background, recounting the minor scale epics and tragedies of the younger part of Upper East Side society with rueful and self-deprecating wit.

He moved location, in his second film Barcelona, exposing his American Innocents Abroad to deeply-entrenched-in-European-culture Anti-American prejudices, and seemed to be proceeding from strength to strength artistically.

But then, in 1998, came Last Days of Disco. Whit Stillman’s cynical, frivolous, and preppified personal world view somehow successfully crossed political and social barriers to appeal to a broad-based audience in his first two films, but Last Days of Disco seemed overly subjective and repelled audiences. No one in the late 1990s, other than Stillman it seems, lamented the passing of the Disco music era (most people were happy to participate in Disco record bonfires) or the demise of Studio 54.

The negative reception received by Last Days caused its director to vanish for twelve years, but as Mara Altman learns in an interview with Stillman appearing in First Things, rejoicing is in order. Whit Stillman is currently shooting another film due to be released next year.

[W]hen Disco didn’t earn the accolades Stillman had come to expect, he decided to retreat from New York, his wife, two daughters, and wounded feelings in tow.

Mostly, though, Stillman just wanted to live somewhere cheaper. But he also had another problem: His trunk was empty. To him, a trunk means a body of material or manuscripts that a writer keeps around and, over time, can come back to rewrite and reconceive. He took his first stab at Barcelona in 1983. It took more than ten years and multiple rewrites before it hit the screen. “After I finished Disco, I had no trunk,” he says. “Since then, I have been recreating my trunk.” ...

[T]he wait is almost over. Under the cloak of secrecy, Stillman has at last returned to the role of director. He has just finished shooting his first movie in twelve years, on the streets of New York, his home again after several years of self-imposed European exile. Its working title is Damsels in Distress, and it’s about a group of perfume-obsessed college girls—some suffer from nasal-shock syndrome at the faintest sniff of B.O.—who run a suicide-prevention center. Stillman has raised the money and written the script, which has a honed Whitonian perspective and Whit-icisms galore. And although the film offers the possibility of a cameo appearance by Stillman staple Chris Eigeman, who has appeared in all three of his movies, it will not make a quadrilogy of his trilogy. “This film is different,” Stillman says. “Completely different. Okay, not completely different, but it’s different.”

I didn’t think much of Last Days when I saw it the first few times, but recently one of the cable networks was playing it and replaying it for several weeks. I not only grew fonder of the film. I found myself watching it over and over without tiring of it. Several individual performances, particularly Kate Beckinsale’s, inspired admiration, and the cad’s wronging of the sweet and intelligent Alice (Chloë Sevigny) increasingly moved this viewer.

Let’s hope that the years in exile have refilled the Stillman steamer trunk to overflowing, and that Damsels in Distress marks the beginning of a long and productive second career stage. Whit Stillman working in Dunkin’ Doughnuts. Whit Stillman frequenting diners. That just isn’t right. Hopefully Damsels will be a hit, and his Cobb Salads will be henceforward ordered in the Harvard Club.

Hat tip to Susan Vigilante via Walter Olson.

National Review Campaign Spot blogger Jim Geraghty interviews the Jedi master who trained Karl Rove: political mastermind Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Obi-Wan: First, THE FADING-GOP WAVE SCENARIO: This one is easy. If the generic GOP lead starts to fade and this continues through the weekend to a few points or nearly even on Election Day, then the GOP makes gains in the House but fails to take control, and gains three or four in the Senate. (With disappointments in places like Pennsylvania, Colorado, California and maybe Nevada.)

Second, THE OKAY WAVE SCENARIO: Polling stays about where it is — with strong generic GOP lead (5 to 9 percentage points or more) as GOP leads in many Senate races stay roughly the same; in places like Washington, California, and Connecticut, Democrat candidates either break 50 percent or keep a steady gap or widen it. Still, a wave election, with House gains of up to 50 or 60. But GOP fails at Senate control by two to four seats, which shows that (1) to some extent the Democrats’ strategy of individualizing Senate races with harsh negative attacks worked or (2) voters just chose to channel their anger at the Obama administration in their House voting but were discriminating – picking and choosing — in the Senate races.

Third, THE HAPPY-TIMES WAVE SCENARIO: Polling stays about where it is — with strong generic GOP lead between 5 and 9 and GOP Senate candidates in Washington, California, and Connecticut still within reach (6 to 9 points down). There you would see House gains of up to 50 or 60 or a bit beyond, and it’s a wave election that really does lift all boats and the GOP takes the Senate by a vote or two.

Fourth, THE SUPERWAVE: House gains of 60 to 90, even beyond. Senate races carried along as GOP ends up with three- or four-vote margin in Senate. ...

Jim: You sound like you think the Superwave is upon us.

Obi-Wan: See, there you go getting pushy again. How can you predict something that hasn’t happened before?

Hat tip to George Smiley.

From the Anchoress:

Full-length theatrical trailer for the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit, to be released Xmas, 2010.

Shorter Mattie’s-eye-view version with music by the Peasall Sisters, labeled a teaser trailer:

The Dude standing in for the Duke will be interesting to see. The trailers suggest that the Coen Brothers’ version will be darker and scarier than the 1969 Henry Hathaway original.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Coming this Fall.

New York Times:

According to Mr. Griggs, some prospective crew members on his new documentary, “I Want Your Money,” which takes aim at President Obama’s economic policies, said they would accept jobs on the condition that their names be left off the credits. Mr. Griggs suspects that a politically motivated makeup artist even tried to sabotage the movie by giving him a distinctly unflattering look.

But his film, like “Fahrenheit” before it, is now to be released in a heated political season. And that is at least a minor triumph for one of the less visible minorities: the Hollywood right.

Scheduled by Freestyle Releasing to open in about 500 theaters on Oct. 15.

Titanic and Avatar director and noted Warmist James Cameron apparently recently chickened out of a debate with skeptics he arranged himself.

One of his disappointed opponents, Anne McElhinney, tells her story.

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.

The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview. ...

[A] few weeks ago… [h]is representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.

Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.

They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.

“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.

It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.

But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.

For Mr. Cameron: Monty Python’s Ballad of Sir Robin 2:02 video

Annie Oakley’s 150th birthday was last Friday. They say she used to be to able split an edge-on playing card in two from 90’ (27.432 meters) with a .22.

She appeared in the 11th Kinetoscope movie made by Thomas Edison in his Black Maria [see Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler: ein film aus Deutschland (1977)] studio, November 1, 1894. Annie Oakley’s shooting wasn’t really displayed at its best in the tiny studio, but it’s fascinating to see even 0:24 seconds of film made when Grover Cleveland was in the White house.