House of Eratosthenes

After two or three years writing about it, I feel like an ass even watching it let alone writing about it some more. The updates are so sparse and low-key, and it’s like half a year before I even become aware of them. Not exactly cutting-edge stuff.

Anyway, some other guy is going to play John Galt, and it’s not Brad Pitt. Good. They gots themselves a pretty picture…

I still say — Kristin Kreuk for Dagny Taggart, Mel Gibson for Hank Rearden. Because a yawning obscene age difference is a good thing. Kristin could pass for 35, and she looks like she knows something you don’t. And would melt you like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, if you saw her in a business suit with librarian glasses. Mel can pull off the “absurdly rich guy who got his start in the coal mines” look better than anyone, not so much because of his acting ability — which is considerable — but because it isn’t that much of a stretch.

What really nails it shut for me, in my mind, about Kreuk is that although she’s young, I could spend five hours watching her try to figure something out, and fail, and not jump to the conclusion that she’s some kind of a dimwit. That’s a tough act. I don’t think Angelina Jolie can pull it off. Mixed in with that, is the feeling that Dagny knows what is happening to the world around her and is just afraid to admit it because she finds the thought to be opprobrious. That, too, is a role I think Kreuk can fill, that Jolie can’t.

Guy Pearce is on my list to play James Taggart. He’s just kind of…sneaky. He looks like he could fool people into trusting him.

Thirty-seven is the minimum age for the Atlas Shrugged characters. Hollywood likes to define that same age as a ceiling. If they do that here, it will ruin the movie. Dagny should be the only one who looks under 45.

And of course, everyone’s childless.

Atlas Shrugged producers, you need any other tips or bits of advice, you give me a call.

Update 6/5/08: Over on JamesBondWiki we were debating the merits of an American Bond, an idea to which I’m emphatically opposed. James Denton‘s name came up. I happen to like Denton because he’s a genuinely good actor, he’s supposed to make the ladies happy, and he’s older than me. This is something I find reassuring.

And dang, that guy’s got Hank Rearden written all over him.

I’ve been aware for a long time, that besides the marginal possibility that Hollywood will ignore my Atlas Shrugged fantasy casting list — there’s always that — Mel Gibson has demons, and he’d still be getting a little long in the tooth even if he didn’t have ’em. Denton would be great. I can see him in a tense standoff with Dr. Ferris in his palatial yet spartan office at the steel mill, and I can see him slaving away in a quarry or a coal mine.

Can’t see him delivering a two thousand word monologue when Dagny is (spoiler — highlight with your mouse to read) dumping his sorry ass. But that’s a problem that’ll have to be worked out no matter who lands the role. You know — I’m inclined to think that’s one of the bits that’ll be shaved down.

Thanks for filling me in on this. I finished the book only a few months ago, and I liked it very much.

The childless thing was something that stuck out to me, as a major flaw in the “philosophy” if you want to call it that. It sounds like you have an opinion you’d like to share on it…
- wch | 06/04/2008 @ 16:42
Nothing quite so much. I think Ayn Rand makes a lot of good points about how people behave, and how we’re tempted to behave when we create and live in social structures with each other.

As a philosophy, one that is intended to replace God, I think Rand’s objectivism is incomplete, and she takes exceptional steps to keep all her characters childless in order to get around that incompleteness. For me, I knew for a fact there was a God, through the process of becoming a father. Rand never had children herself. So this represents a whole collection of logical conundrums and moral dilemmas with which she never had to wrestle.

For example — how do you make sure this new society in Galt’s Gulch is kept pristine of all the demons that plagued the rest of society, before the Men of the Mind saw fit to quit & go marching off to Colorado? What happens when there is a proposed rule, and some of the people living in this new society think it should be ratified, and others do not? Do they settle it democratically? Or is it, just whatever John Galt says?

What happens if Ellis Wyatt blows off his hands in an accident with his shale oil refining machine? Is it up to him to use his amazing resourcefulness to find another way to make a living? What if it happens to Richard Haley, who now can’t write music anymore? Is it “back to the other side of the wall with you”? If Galt’s Gulch manages to avoid the thorny problem of human weakness, by casting off it’s flotsam and jetsam to the rest of the world, effectively practicing genocide by exile, why then it would for all practical purposes be a parasite on the rest of the world wouldn’t it? And thus negating not only it’s existence, but it’s founding principles as well.

But Rand really goes astray when she incorporates atheism into objectivism, the latter of which is supposed to pronounce that our rights have been violated abhorrently if — any one of a number of things. If we’re compelled to part with our property involuntarily, if we have to live under rules to which we did not consent, if we are victims of initiated force. Such things are supposed to be blisteringly offensive…to somebody. If there’s no deity, then who is there to get offended at the transgression of these supposed rights? The answer is, just us, and us alone. At which point the argument against these tyrannical rules is that “the person who is inconvenienced by the rule, is not pleased with it.” Well, you can say that about any rule.
- mkfreeberg | 06/04/2008 @ 19:09
Thanks for sharing. When I heard about the book as a guideline for life, I certainly didn’t expect such a gaping hole in its ideas. Pure conjecture: Rand had ideas that folks who could not work or be productive had the moral duty to either “put up or shut up”, by finding value in what they can do, or forcing their own exile (even suicide?). Perhaps the elderly or children of certain maladies. Since it could not be said in 1957, she simply left it out. Just a theory. You seem capable of thinking that one over, and posting about it (which of course I would enjoy immensely). I also found that Galt’s Gulch avoided any talk of shared resources, like roads and (eventually) borders. The true value of a functioning society is how well we can outsource the uninteresting so those who have interests can get to them. I certainly admire any book that can be relevant for 50 plus years, however…

I think that a lot of atheists bash God, but don’t seem to provide better alternatives. The worst ones are the ones that create their own religion (environmentalism) and ignore its faults. Can’t we just call religion a theory, which has not yet been fully explained or disproven? Works for evolution.
- wch | 06/05/2008 @ 08:22
[…] thinking the last attempt we put out to stay up-to-date on this was here, when it was a completely different cast & production crew. Not sure what happened to that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/22/2010 @ 20:13

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Yet Another Atlas Shrugged UpdateWednesday, June 4th, 2008

Yet Another Atlas Shrugged Update
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008