Shooting of the film version of Atlas Shrugged, after years and years of rumors, actually began over the weekend, Variety reports.

No Angelina Jolie as Dagny, no (magically young again) Max von Sydow as John Galt. Also no James Cameron-scale hundred million dollar production. No major studios. Just a humble $5 million independent production.

Shooting started Saturday because the producers were contractually obligated to begin the five-week shoot or lose the rights to Ayn Rand’s novel.

The reported cast includes:

John Galt (Paul Johansson)

Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling)

Henry Rearden (Grant Bowler)

The film does have an IMDB page.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

I’m not sure what those two guys have to do with one another, but the video is amusing, Karen and I both like Joss Whedon‘s shows (Dollhouse not so much), and I tend to feel a personal responsibility in blogging to include as much Glenn Reynolds-friendly libertarian nerd culture material as possible. Besides, when I blog it, that means I don’t have to email it to friends.

2:10 video

Whedonesque — key Whedon fan-site providing information on new Whedon programming and a lot more than I want to know.

Hat tip to Brett via Karen L. Myers.

As found in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) by Neoneocon commenter Jim Sullivan:

It’s OK to kill things as long as you use a bow and arrow and not a gun or missile.

Teh Interwebz au Naturale of the Allmother (or whatever the f*** the Giganto-smurfs called her) beats the technology of a species that has harvested the power of the atom, is capable of celestial travel, and has armored the unholy f*** out of everything. Also:

It’s a much better way to call up your bizarro world rhino and pterodactyl allies (the ones that previously wanted to eat you) than a Tarzan call or a Conch shell. But, you still have to send the Dire-pony express to the Four Corners of the world to rally the tribes.

Soldiers are bad unless they are A) not Caucasian or B) handi-capped. All other soldiers are A)psychopaths B) mindless myrmidons or C) nameless cannon fodder (or in this case arrow fodder)

Even shallow, selfish, homicidal savages are good because they’re…savages and therefore inherently and unquestionably noble.

The best way for primitive screw-heads to fight off a technologically superior, militarily sophisticated force is to fight the superior force on their terms. Asymmetric strategy, insurgent tactics and guerrilla warfare couldn’t possibly even the odds. Not in a million years.

All scientists are compassionate and resent the very soldiers prepared to die to protect them. This is completely reasonable and in no way intellectually dishonest. Hollywood decrees it!

Subjugating other species is wrong… unless you are able to have mind-blowing ponytail intercourse and biologically hack into their brain. Then it’s OK.

When you encounter a new mineral that floats and causes whole mountain ranges to float, the coolest, catchiest, most marketable name for it is Unobtainium. After you succeed in mining it, it semantically transforms,a la magma/lava, into HaHaHa!It’sAllMine-ite.

When the nobly savage Giganto-smurfs, the Emo-scientists and their Land-networked planetary defense menagerie evict the eeevil military-capitalist Gestapo from their idyllic floating mountain paradise back to their ecologically dead world, the nature frolickers all live happily ever after. There’s no chance in hell that those same military-capitalists will return with a full blown invasion fleet. Never happen. Hollywood decrees it!

Hat tip to Vanderleun via the Barrister.

You are rich, immortal, a century old vampire who has all the learning and experience of very long human lifetime, the opportunity to live anywhere you choose and do anything you like, but a personal need for privacy, anonymity, and –of course– routine access to prey.

Naturally, you select the rural, 3,000 population town of Forks, Washington over Paris, London, Shanghai, and New York, attend high school and become romantically (and non-predaciously) involved with a 17 year old girl, and you dine on deer.

It was the high school part that gave Karen and myself the most serious problem. We both felt strongly that, were we vampires ourselves, we would consider high school in the upper rank of the same category of undesirable things as garlic, stakes, and crucifixes.

Karen and I actually read several volumes of the Twilight young adult series a few years ago when it began attracting wide attention. We found the novels readable enough, at least in the early portion of the series. The energy and marginal plausibility of character motivation and behavior seemed to weaken significantly in later volumes, and we quit reading before the series reached its conclusion.

As everyone knows, vampires have become a favorite theme in popular culture, offering the female audience male leads combining power and sophistication with melancholy complexity. The vampire is, of course, the bad boy par excellence offering an otherwise unequaled opportunity for any girl to give him the special understanding he needs and then to redeem him by her love.

We’ve been too busy hunting to be going to movies these days. I’ll have to wait to see Twilight (2008) and The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) when they appear on cable, but I was familiar enough with all this to enjoy the major mockfest of 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight.

The 9:58 Rifftrax video is also quite amusing.

Roman Polanski

The director Roman Polanski is a significant artist of international stature. He is also 76 years old. More than 30 years ago, Polanski had sex with an underage girl in California. The judicial proceedings which took place at the time were improperly influenced by the superfluity of media attention focused on a famous Hollywood director entangled in a sex scandal.

Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired made it generally known that Polanski accepted a plea bargain which put him behind bars in very unpleasant circumstances “for psychiatric evaluation” for 42 days in Chino State Prison. After which time, according to the deal made with prosecutors, Polanski was supposed to be let off without further incarceration.

Newspaper reports, however, inflamed public opinion about the case, and Judge Laurence Rittenband arbitrarily decided to void Polanski’s plea bargain and impose an exemplary sentence, essentially sacrificing the unlucky director for the gratification of the tabloid mob. Polanski was temporarily at large when he learned of the judge’s intentions, and prudently fled into exile in Europe.

Polanski was certainly guilty of a form of sexual misbehavior which, depending on the overall circumstances, can be prosecuted as a serious crime. But consensual sex with underage girls is only “rape” in a technical sense. Michelle Malkin is making a regrettable spectacle of herself striking ridiculous moralistic poses, calling Polanski a “perv,” and describing sensible persons disinclined to support wasting government time and resources on seeking pointless vengeance on an old man a generation after the fact “crime-coddling apologists.”

This kind of naive legal absolutism rests on a childish fantasy that human acts, their legal status, and the outcome of judicial proceedings are matters of black and white, that good people, like Michelle Malkin and the rest of us on the Right, are always in favor of enforcing the letter of the law. I’m not. Laws (like our immigration and drug laws) can be ill-considered. Courts are sometimes corrupt. They are sometimes mistaken. Laws can be wrongly or simply arbitrarily enforced. After 30 years, some laws are no longer worth enforcing, some cases are no longer worth punishing.

The young woman who had sex with Polanski, now middle-aged, has said publicly that she thought she was being exploited by the court at the time, that she forgives Polanski, and that she finds the idea of re-opening the case against him embarrassing to herself and her family. So whom do we need to be avenging?

Patterico, who actually works at the same Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has gone even more loco with the same law-and-order zealotry.

He is raving about a conflict of interest in Anne Applebaum editorializing in favor of clemency in a stale and aged case involving an internationally renowned artist who is elderly, who has made significant cultural contributions, and who has himself been more than once a victim of terrible injustices. Anne Applebaum, you see, is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. Polanski is a Pole, and Poland is protesting his arrest, so Patterico thinks her editorials need to be accompanied by a warning of undue influence from the Polish Government. Lord!

I personally think conservative righteousness, outrage, and pettyfogging argument is more appropriately reserved for graver issues than a case of Hollywood hanky-panky from thirty years in the past. And, until Utopia is achieved and we have a perfect legal system administered by angels, applying a flawless legal code in every case with precision accuracy and scrupulous evenhandedness, I think we can skip all the rah-rah law-and-order nonsense.

Sometimes the law is an ass. And the day the US undertook to extradite Roman Polanski over a roll in the hay that occurred during the opening days of the Consulship of Jimmy Carter is one of those times.

Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) tells a few hard truths to Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

David Brooks watches John Ford Westerns (apparently only one John Ford Western), and advises us that John Ford movies are all about communitarianism. According to Brooks, John Ford Westerns are paeans to the collectivist statist ideals of Barack Obama and the democrat party.

We Republicans need to register (and then surrender) our sixguns, turn over our poker chips to build a new schoolhouse, hire some government administrators, and then come out to the church social to sing hymns.

Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.

But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.

For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.

The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.

Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.

———————————-

James Bowman, in a posting titled A Ford Not a Lincoln, rebuts nicely adding another John Ford film to the discussion which illuminates the message Brooks misunderstands much more clearly.

In this movie as in others by Ford, particularly The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), we see both things: both the community and civilization that people, left in peace, will spontaneously create for themselves and the lone man with the gun, free and solitary, whom the community, often without knowing it, depends on to be left in peace. Without the one, there would not be the other. Ford’s point in both movies is that the community will happily discard and exile and finally forget about the hero, once his work is done. Mr Brooks himself unwittingly illustrates it by forgetting about him, or regarding him as incidental material.

In both movies, too, the hero is complict in his own marginalization by the community he saves. He prefers to live apart from it, partly because, in order to do what he does, he belongs more to the savage, honor-bound, heroic world that he helps to supplant. In Liberty Valance, John Wayne’s forgotten hero, Tom Doniphon has far more in common with Lee Marvin’s Liberty (significant name) than he does with Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard. Stoddard even marries the woman he, Doniphon, loves, which makes his rescue both of Stoddard and of the world of law and civic order he represents even more of a noble renunciation than it would be in any case. Tellingly, Ford also shows how the town wants to tell itself a false story about Doniphon’s act of murder, in order to bring it under the umbrella of law and civic order which that act has made possible. And those who know the true story — that in the end civilization itself depends on the man with the gun — allow the false one to stand. Ford must have foreseen even in 1964 the time nearly half a century on when people like David Brooks would have forgotten that primal act of heroism that makes everything else possible and so come to believe, like the townsfolk of Shinbone in Ford’s movie, that civilization can bring itself to birth and sustain itself without the need for honor and courage.

Recent political developments have made Ayn Rand’s masterpiece timely and topical and Hollywood.com reports that financing may be in the works to begin production of the film version.

Charleze Theron seems to have replaced Angelina Jolie as the front runner to play Dagny Taggart.

Ryan Kavanaugh is said to be circling the eternally stuck-in-development-hell big-screen adaptation of Ayn Rand’s self-styled ‘magnum opus,’ Atlas Shrugged.

Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media, according to the Risky Biz blog, could come aboard to finance the Baldwin Entertainment project with Lionsgate.

While Angelina Jolie was the most recent name attached to play protagonist Dagny Taggart, the blog says that other stars now interested include Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway.

Given the book’s themes of individualism that resonate in the era of Obama, government bailouts and stimulus packages, this could be the perfect time to finally get the book to the screen.

“This couldn’t be more timely,” Karen Baldwin, who along with husband Howard is producing, told BIZ. “It’s uncanny what Rand was able to predict — about the only things she didn’t anticipate are cell phones and the Internet.”

With the recession, the book has experienced a resurgence. As of today, it is listed as top seller on Amazon in the Literature & Fiction Literary and Classics categories.

The story first appeared at Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz blog.

Wanted (2008)

Angelina Jolie, since Laura Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), has made something of a personal specialty of portraying female comic book (or video game) heroines with superhuman abilities at striking both targets and cool poses.

In America, chicks-with-guns is (Example 1, Example 2) is a popular pin-up picture and video genre, but Puritan statism’s hostility to guns is far more advanced in Britain.

Just watching voluptuous Angelina Jolie strike provocative shooting poses could shatter British phlegm and impel legions of bowler-hatted, umbrella-toting Essex men to fly their cubicles and turn to Quentin Tarantino-style orgies of violence, or at least so evidently supposes Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority which has banned the 0:35 minute trailer for Angelina’s new film.

The Guardian reports:

A television advert for the film Wanted, in which Angelina Jolie was shown firing a bullet towards the audience, has been banned by media watchdogs for glamorising violence.

The promo for the DVD release of the action blockbuster showed Jolie kissing co-star James McAvoy during a high-speed car chase before the pair turned and fired their guns in the direction of the viewer. For good measure, a voiceover described Wanted as “the coolest movie of the year”.

The advert received just one complaint from the public, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it suggested that “using guns was sexy and glamorous”, which breached the code for television.

The move follows the ASA’s decision in September to ban billboard posters for the film’s theatrical release. These featured Jolie and McAvoy holding guns in a variety of positions in a comic book-style montage of pictures.

Some news agency

They banned this 0:35 trailer.

They probably really wouldn’t like the 2:23 long version any better.

New 53 minute video with Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Russell Chatham, and the late Richard Brautigan. Music by Jimmy Buffet.

Guy de la Vadene was one of the film makers.

Tip from Steve Bodio.

A short which has appeared at 34 film festivals and received 17 awards. Too warm and fuzzy for my taste, but some people may enjoy it.

16:23 video

Andrew Breitbart’s new group blog forum for film industry conservatives launched yesterday. First day’s posters include Andrew Klavan, John Nolte, Orson Bean, Melanie Graham, and “Veritas Obviam” (who obviously does not want to lose his career). Perhaps this one will fill the badly needed role of main conservative outlet for commentary on new movie releases and the ideological excesses of the establishment film industry.

To commemorate the US release next month of Stephen Soderbergh’s Che biopic starring Benicio Del Toro, Reason’s Nick Gillespie takes a skeptical look at the community of fashion’s love of Communists used as iconography.

8:33 video