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sad meow - 2008-01-23 22:54:54
I hope you're feeling better!
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Paula - 2008-01-23 22:56:27
Thanks, Sad Meow! I am feeling much better!
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Steve - 2008-01-23 23:11:13
My memories of the Dick Van Dyke show center around staying home from school sick, so I have trouble watching that show when I'm not delerious with a fever..
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Paula - 2008-01-23 23:28:03
Cosmic--the episode of Columbo I watched starred DVD as a murderous photographer!
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2fs - 2008-01-23 23:32:05
Sad to hear about your recent unpleasant experiences. Aside from watching The Fountainhead, I expect having the flu was no fun either.
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grigorss - 2008-01-23 23:38:24
The Fountainhead is actually quite an enyoyable little flick -- if you regard it as a comedy; which of course it was never intended to be. But as far moments of unintentional hilarity go, it's right up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space. In addition, your illness prevented you from playing The Fountainhead drinking game; everytime you see Gary Cooper posing next to something that's clearly a phallic symbol, you take a shot; my geuss is that with this movie, you'll be under the table in about 15 minutes...
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Paula - 2008-01-23 23:41:23
Honk!
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The Jestaplero! - 2008-01-24 12:34:39
I read recently that Mary Tyler Moore used to call Dick Van Dyke "Penis Van Lesbian." But I somehow can't imagine those words coming from her.
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Greg - 2008-01-24 12:53:08
I read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead to be little else but tedious, verbose justification for being a selfish dick.
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Paula - 2008-01-24 12:55:53
That anecdote brightened my day considerably. Thank you.
You know, MTM was from Brooklyn, I bet she has a little more moxie than people give her credit for...
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Paula - 2008-01-24 13:06:06
Greg: I think I may have read ATLAS SHRUGGED in highschool, but it's all a blur.
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Paula - 2008-01-24 14:15:27
Wait, no, it was Anthem.
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Greg - 2008-01-24 15:56:55
My experience with Ayn Rand is that she makes a compelling argument, particularly amongst teen boys, that indulging the id is in fact a moral path and if other people can't compete... oh well, too bad. I'm just glad her books are generally too long for the meaner segments of our society to read... with a few unfortunate exceptions.
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Sharon - 2008-01-24 17:57:57
Greg- I love that phrase for describing the Ayn Rand philosophy..."verbose justification for being a selfish dick" I'm going to steal it!
....Sad about Heath Ledger, one of those great actors uncomfortable in his own skin?Used it to great effect in Brokeback. I don't think that film would have had the same impact without him. And wasn't his voice rich and gorgeous?(- except when stammering his way through vapid promotional interviews, that is.)
Glad you're feeling better, Miss Paula!
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Eric - 2008-01-24 21:04:09
Is it as clumsy, clunky, humorless, and morally black-and-white as the movie?
YES! Ony it takes more time to finish.
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Paula - 2008-01-24 21:41:33
Eric, are you commenting from your new high-falutin' ivory tower of higher learnin'?
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Eric - 2008-01-24 23:15:55
Yes I am!
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Bina - 2008-01-24 23:58:40
I read the Fountainhead late last year and found it to be one of the most interesting, compelling books I've read in possibly my whole life. It was one of those books where you can lose yourself in a parallel universe for a while. The best part about it was the characterization. I found myself actually hissing at the antagonist in some of the scenes. I don't plan to watch the movie because I don't like old movies, but if they ever did a modern remake they could easily do some stunning cinematography in upstate New York. I'm now working my way through Atlas Shrugged and it's more dense and difficult than The Fountainhead. I realize that my comments are going to earn me the scorn of this board, but I don't care. (PS I hear that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are looking to make Atlas Shrugged into a movie and I don't want to watch that either).
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Paula - 2008-01-25 08:42:06
Hey Bina, variety is the spice of the horse race, or something. Dissenting opinions are always welcome.
Also, speaking of stunning cinematography, one thing I can't fault the film version of The F-head for is the cinematography which was pretty great--and Patricia Neal's wardrobe was inspired.
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Bina - 2008-01-25 08:59:41
One thing about Hollywood movies is that they always take a work of fiction that is very complex and try to simplify it because they think audiences are stupid. They think they're respecting the audience, but truly they are not.
The Fountainhead presents a picture of man as he should be - possessing integrity, true to his principles, his artistic vision, his creative impulse. There are parallels between her theory of a "selfish" man and Maslow's model of "self-actualization" although the two are not interchangeable.
In contrast she paints portraits of men who never were and don't know it, men who never were and do know it, and the woman who is the perfect counterpart to the selfish man. I thought it to be quite masterful, and I also liked it for how it portrayed New York in the 1920s and 30s.
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Bina - 2008-01-25 09:57:59
Bina, I find the Maslow parallels very fleeting at best and even so, I'm not sure how I feel about Maslow either. I don't even know if I want to live in a world where everybody is true to their individual creative impulses... I think it's important to remember that Rand was as much a political theorist as a philosopher... and I believe really quite short-sighted and naive as a political theorist. I simply don't see anything noble in her model of the selfish man... less than that really. I think adherents to her brand of objectivism are unpleasant and potentially dangerous.
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Greg - 2008-01-25 10:00:18
Oops.... I always think that Your Name section is an addressee box.
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Bina - 2008-01-25 11:19:01
I was always scared of philosophy and so never took any courses in it... be that as it may, I know Rand was anti-collectivism and pro-free market, which I don't agree with. However the "selfish" characters turn out to be the most giving, and philanthropic, while the so-called "selfless" ones are the meanest and least humane.
What I do feel is that the novel is very well written and its literary merits are pretty hard to deny.
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Paula - 2008-01-25 12:32:07
Well, where the screenplay fails is that there is not one character who behaves anything like a normal human being. There is the mighty, uncompromising Roark, and then a buncha godawful rapscallions and scoundrels and hooligans and miscreants...and lots and lots of speechifyin'...
That's bad art.
No matter how much a character is meant to embody an ideal, if they are not fleshed out, the work becomes like a grade school pageant about the merits of nutrition: "I am Vitamin C! I will prevent scurvy and colds!"
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Bina - 2008-01-25 13:12:37
Probably they shouldn't have had Ayn Rand write the screenplay. Hollywood always likes a screenplay based on a novel, though, because good novelists are such good storytellers. But that doesn't mean they know how to translate that into a screenplay that works. The grand speeches seem much more appropriate in the novel, where you've got the space of several pages to build up a momentum, and it all fits in context with what she says in the (non spoken) text.
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Paula - 2008-01-25 15:30:57
Well, that makes sense. Perhaps...someday...maybe...I will give one of her novels a try. But I just got the new Denis Johnson from the 'berry, so that'll have to wait...
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Greg - 2008-01-25 16:09:58
Terry Southern wrote a great bit in his book (and this goes back a way) about how many modern novels seemed to be written with adaptation to screen in mind, so they might as well skip the novel and go straight to screenplay. I'd never thought of that before but became very conscious of it. With many I read now it's hard to imagine that they weren't screenplays adapted to novel form, or at least written with adaptation very much in the plans.
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Bina - 2008-01-26 00:44:18
There are some novels in which that's very clumsily done, Greg, and you can see it a mile away. Then there are other novels which are so rich and visual that they make it easy for a good screenwriter to adapt them, and a good director to bring them to cinematic life. Atonement is a case in point; so is Brokeback Mountain, based on a short story. Even Perfume was based on a novel and it was Tom Twyker's talent as a director that he managed to visualize passages and passages describing scent and smell to such good effect.
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