Groucho

Here are some examples of actual positive user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes:

Plus a ton of spam "reviews" shilling unrelated shopping sites.

Mr. Salty

I have a couple of comments for this Jeffrey W. fellow, although I suspect they wouldn't penetrate his tinfoil hat:

1. I was not aware that Hollywood was a publicly funded entity.

2. Two of the "liberal" major movie studios are owned by General Electric and Rupert Murdoch, both of whom should embrace an Ayn Rand project. But apparently they didn't.

Numanoid

Exactly why I DON'T have more faith in the user reviews.

DonnachaOne

An understandable viewpoint, but since the film has been marketed to a narrow demographic, it's hard to gauge how much of the audience opinion is fan overpraise, designed to "counter-attack" enemies real or imagined. Who Killed The Electric Car was a bland doc that was overpraised by people who seemed to review the car rather than the film, and if Big Money Rustlas had 90% audience approval, the rating would be meaningless because it was preaching to its Juggalo choir.

starman9000

Stop making sense.

Hokeyboy

The same moviegoers who pushed Transformers 2 to $400million+ domestic and made Avatar the highest-grossing movie of all time? THAT'S the horse you're backing?

JumpCutz

^Bingo.

The user comments following the negative reviews at RT are a shit storm of crazy.

Neeb

Mainly because the embrace money more.

Norm de Plume

True, nifty car, but the doc didn't do a very good job communicating condemnation for the crooks who deserved it.

Matthew Chmiel

You've obviously never read the book because it takes place in a dystopian future.

Politics aside, don't read the book either. It's boring.

Or see the movie.

Better off, do something else.

MartinBlank

http://www.libertasfilmmagazine.com/

RocShemp

Who the hell is Jason Apuzzo and why should his opinion about an apparently shitty movie matter?

Sondheim

From glancing at the site, it seems he's someone who likes to condemn lots of movies, from "Source Code" to "Hanna" to the Bourne films, for a supposed anti-American, anti-freedom, pro-terrorist bias. He's also apparently a Rand fan, so his judgment of the film is especially damning. Or something.

Giles

now THAT was a good movie ...

PopcornTreeCt

What does Paul Ryan think? He's a huge Ayn Rand supporter.

Matthew Chmiel

I'm pretty sure a theatrical rerelease of Stop Making Sense would've grossed more than Atlas Shrugged this weekend.

woofman

Ok bear with me on this one.

I consider myself to be a fairly liberal minded person, nothing real extreme, I try to be open minded, and I respect other perspectives and attempt to be as un-biased and fair as possible.

I'm not a super-intellect by any means, and often need things literally spelled out for me to understand what I missed when I read something as I usually take it at face value and don't read always between the lines.

I read this book and really enjoyed it. However, based on most of the responses I've read in this thread, I feel like I didn't pick up on a lot of underlying themes that apparently many are writing off as a conservative piece of garbage.

I found the book-regardless of the subject matter, to be well written compared to many popular fiction novels today, it just seemed to carry more substance, more intellectual content, and a compelling story. I'm honestly not saying that because I may agree or disagree with the subject matter. I found the main characters (Dagny, Hank, John and their crew) to be very intelligent, have integrity,were logical, and objective. Do people consider this to be a liberal vs conservative type theme? There was a very obvious preference for reason/logic intellect vs faith based thinking, and I'm sure with all the pages used picking apart the latter turned a lot of people off regardless of anything else the story brought to the table.

Can someone please share with me briefly and as objectively as possible what specific elements in the book cause it to be considered the way it is so I can improve and expand my own perspective of it and continue to form an opinion.

I'm not looking to argue or try to convince anyone to change their view, simply get a better understanding so I can build my own assessment. Kind of an Atlas Shrugged for dummies if you will

The Antipodean

I loved the book when I was 20. Now that I'm 40 I find it rather thin on the ground, and that some of the decent ideas of self-reliance and independence have been totally hijacked by the wingnuts.

Josh-da-man

It seems to take place in an alternate universe more than a dystopian future. The book seems to have minimal connections to any kind of real world history or politics.

It's readable, but it's far from great literature. I would liken it to the Da Vinci Code novel in that respect, though the Da Vinci Code is a much shorter read. (I've never managed to read more than a chapter or two in The Fountainhead, though. Now that book is unreadable.)

Being receptive to the message probably helps in one's enjoyment of the book, otherwise it's just beating you over the head with propaganda. I think Ayn Rand could have been a decent writer, but she was so beholden to her own bullshit that it tied her down to dealing with boring absolutes; her characters are either infallible code heroes or straw men antagonists.

Hokeyboy

The Fountainhead is one of my all-time favorites. I absolutely love that novel. I got the conservative themes from it, but I also got a wonderful story about uncompromising creative and artistic integrity. Even with its "Oh, BULLSHIT!!!" ending.

Atlas Shrugged is absolute SHIT in comparison. It's absolute shit, period.

Labor

The RT user rating is high because normal human beings who don't want to lower themselves by watching this turgid filth won't even bother to see this garbage and rate it. Even if it was showing in more theaters.

Its easy to inflate a score when the only people giving a score are awful human beings.

I mean, do people seriously need to be reminded of what kind of lunatic actually enjoys this garbage "literature?" Of course they will go out of their way to go on every site of the internet and highly rate it.

To even insinuate that the positive rating is indicative of general audience tastes makes you as suspect as the psychotics who liked this movie.

Troy Stiffler

Yea. And that place is a fucking poor house. Somebody tell Hollywood that it needs to pull itself up by it's own bootstraps. Bunch of poor bastards, suckling off the teet of driven, hard-working, wealthy folks.

Hokeyboy

Heh. "Teets".

Patman

Ayn Rand's novel has been brought to the big screen in a multi-part presentation. In the not too distant future, the economy is in the crapper, gas prices have skyrocketed, causing air travel to become less of a feasible way to travel or for transport, railroads have regained a footing in filling in that transportation need for people and business.

Taggert Transcontinental is run by a brother-sister team of James and Dagney Taggart after their father passed away. James is not the smart one, while Dagny not only has a engineering background, but is business-savvy in an age where it becomes harder to keep their railroad transport company afloat. I liked Taylor Schilling as Dagny in this role. Grant Bowler plays Henry Rearden, the CEO and architect of Rearden Metal (and other business holdings). Rearden Metal has been able to produce a lighter, stronger version of steel, and Dagny is willing to bet that it can be used to replace worn out railroad tracks, especially in the run to Colorado, where a crucial customer, Wyatt Petroleum, is looking to jump ship due to James' incompetent handling of the business. James is far more reliant on goverment regulation to keep his company afloat, while sister Dagny forges ahead with actual business deal-making.

Obviously the broad strokes of determination of individuals in the face of oppressive governmental controls in the guise of the public welfare is a major thrust in Rand's novel, and the script is pretty polar about the 2 sides, so not too many shades of grey happening here. This film is tailored to a specific audience with specific leanings, that's can't really be argued. But viewed as any other film where the protagonist has to overcome what appears to be insurmountable odds to achieve their goals, it works from that perspective. It's just that the depiction of the antagonists probably hit home far too easily given even today's political climate.

The film as cinema is fairly average, the production budget wasn't big, and it shows, and the direction by Paul Johansson has a nightly soap opera quality to it, here and there, but the storytelling was satisfactory. I'll check out Part 2 when it shows up later in the theaters, as I want to see what happens next for Dagny and Henry, as Part 1 ends with a dire turn of events for them both.

I give it 2.75 stars or a grade of B-.

Ketamine

Yes, that's the horse I'm backing over the critics for a movie from a book that is so politcally charged. I also look to moviegoers over critics for movies that are comedies or big budget action flicks. I tend to agree with moviegoers much more often than the critics. Ultimately will decide for myself when I see the movie.

And your post brings a smile to my face. If you were going for swarmy, then you succeeded. Well played my good man, well played. Your movie views are clearly much more enlightened than the masses of people who enjoyed movies like Avatar or Transformers 2.