... it's a monumental piece of crap.Left-wing propaganda? Perhaps. But when The Atlantic's Megan McArdle threw in the towel, herself a connoisseur of the free market, that sure seemed like a little much.
The best word to describe Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is … surprising. It’s surprisingly well-paced, surprisingly intelligent, surprisingly well-acted, and surprisingly entertaining. Perhaps most surprising of all, it has me thinking about re-reading the novel again. I would highly recommend it to friends and their families.And he adds in an update:
I deliberately avoided reading reviews of the film until after I saw it first...I'm not that disciplined, alas, but RTWT. And see also the outstanding piece by Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review Journal. I'd quote it, but considering the Review Journal's a Righthaven partner, folks can just read it at the link.
One thing I worried about was how well the filmmakers would be able to place the setting in present times, 2016, amid a crisis of severe economic dislocation (like we're having under the Obamacrats in D.C. and across the nation). After seeing the opening scenes, and thinking about it a bit more, the scenario of disappearing industrialists seems entirely accurate. Indeed, as I've been reporting here of late, in California we've got the same kind of wrecked economy that Ayn Rand inveighed against. The Los Angeles Times was touting the expansion of the tech sector in February --- 100,000 new jobs were created --- while burying the lede on lingering massive unemployment in the state. But then the March job numbers --- unemployment edged back up to 12.1 percent --- forced the paper to be more honest. And then this weekend the Orange County Register published a devastating piece on the exodus of 69 businesses from the state for the first quarter of 2011. Reading the top ten list of reasons for businesses bailing is a jaw-dropping experience, but one that I'm getting used to. Between Sacramento and Washington, California can't get a break. Indeed, state officials have taken a fact-finding trip to Texas in hopes of stemming the flow of jobs to the Longhorn State and elsewhere.
Let's hope it gets better. For the past two years, the old Sunset Ford dealership in Westminster has been vacant, a symbol of the depression-like marketplace that hammered key sections of the local economy. For more than 40 years Sunset Ford did business at the intersection of the 22 and 405 Freeways, and so it was a shock to see that enterprise close its doors in 2009. And despite the Obama administration's economic stimulus, the location remains idle, like a ghost town:
As I was returning home, I saw this fellow with his homeless sign at the Jamboree offramp at Interstate 5. Notice the sign asks not for handouts, but for help finding ANY work.
This was a couple of weeks ago, and later that afternoon I went shopping at the District in Tustin. Borders is closing its location there, one of the 200 stores nationwide going belly up:
They were unloading everything:
But copies of David Remnick's recent book on the Radical-in-Chief weren't moving so well, and that's at 60 percent off:
And checking over at Jamboree and Main Street in Irvine, this copying business, MyPrint, consolidated with an equity firm and closed this location. The local printing market is pretty messed up:
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