Movie shocker: New York Times finally gets around to panning 'Atlas Shrugged'

In New York media circles, especially in conservative New York media circles, wonderers have been wondering over the past couple of weeks -- will the New York Times ever bother to review "Atlas Shrugged"? The film, which was marketed as the movie liberal Hollywood didn't want you to see, has been a cause célèbre on outlets like Fox News as a daring attempt to bring Ayn Rand's literary celebration of capitalism to the big screen.

The movie's supporters gleefully labeled it a hit after its April 15 opening, since it was indeed that weekend's top-grossing limited release movie, making $1.7 million on only 299 screens. The reviews were horrible, with the film earning a dismal 9% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with Roger Ebert dismissing it as "the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault." Of course, sneers from liberal critics were to be expected.

But despite lots of cheerleading from conservative media outlets, the film's core audience turned out to be pretty small. The movie's box office dropped so much in its second weekend that its backer, conservative businessman John Aglialoro, who spent more than $20 million of his own money making and distributing the film, threw in the towel, telling my colleague Rebecca Keegan that he's considering abandoning plans for proposed second and third installments. "Why should I put up all that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?" he said.

Aglialoro added: "The New York Times gave us the most hateful review of all -- they didn't cover it."

In fact, New York's paper of record routinely reviews virtually every movie, no matter how small, that has a commercial run in New York. But not "Atlas Shrugged," a decision that prompted lots of jeering from the arch-rival New York Post, which repeatedly hammered the NYT for ignoring the film.

On Friday things changed. Two weeks after the film opened, the paper ran a review by Carina Chocano, a former critic at my paper who's been freelancing for Rupert Murdoch's the Daily and writing movie-related essays for the Times' Sunday magazine. Clearly no fan of Rand, Chocano was just as dismissive of the film as all  the other liberal critics. Here's a brief excerpt:

For unintentional yet somehow boring hilarity, the novel can’t touch the cinematic adaptation, which shifts the action to 2016 and presents Rand’s ham-fisted fable of laissez-faire capitalism as something C-Span might make if it ever set out to create a futuristic, proto-libertarian nighttime soap....The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It’s not just the ideologies that feel oddly out of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors — which are meant to register as lavish — instead come across as low-rent and sad.

I'm sure this won't satisfy anyone, certainly not the film's backers, who surely believe more than ever that they didn't get a fair shake from the liberal media, especially when they can point to the disparity between the film's Rotten Tomatoes critic's score (9%) and its audience rating (85%). On the other hand, "The Conspirator," a stagy allegorical drama about a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln by liberal icon Robert Redford, only earned a middling 54% Rotten Tomatoes score, which seems to imply that not all liberal critics are in the bag when it comes to praising their liberal filmmaking brethren.

My advice to conservative filmmakers: Don't waste your time on out-of-date icons like Rand, since today's audiences will rarely show up for any kind of period drama, especially one stuffed with boring political ideology. Make comedies. It's an art form uniquely suited for conservative ideology, since by nature, comedies make fun of self-aggrandizing, out-of-touch, politically correct dolts, which you'd have to admit can be found nearly everywhere in Hollywood.

If academia, for example, is really as brimming with stuffy liberal elitists as conservatives say it is, then surely the time is ripe for a right-leaning "Animal House," with all of the outrageous John Belushi-style Delta House characters played by subversive young conservatives. As D Day's Bruce McGill says in the movie: "We have an old saying in Delta House: Don't get mad, get even." It's good advice. Conservatives should take it.

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'Atlas Shrugged' finally comes to the big screen

Review: 'Atlas Shrugged'

'Atlas Shrugged' producer: 'Critics, you won'

 -- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged," in New York, from a 1962 file photo.

Credit: Associated Press 

Comments

[mark D]

The problem with the idea of a conservative-backed comedy is that, with the exception of P.J. O'Rourke, conservatives aren't funny....ever.

[Native Angeleno]

Let 'em, Goldstein. Unleash those (yawn) "Conservatives".

As Katherine Hepburn woulda pronounced it, in her elderly quaver, "Bowa, bowa, bowa."

[Andy]

"...especially in conservative New York media circles,..."

Aside from the guy from the NY Post (Kyle Smith?), who else is in that group?

[Paddy Sweeney]

I havent had the opportunity to view the movie and it may well be a shocker. However, for crying out loud, review and pan the movie, any movie. But promote only comedies??? You must be joking. I enjoy a good comedy as much as the next person, I also enjoy a good drama regardless of what era it comes from. Under your criteria Brave Heart and the likes should never have been made either. Be constructive think outside your puddle don't be shallow. The rest of the world has many varied tastes and thats what makes it go around.

[Rita]

I don't like the Tea Party left-over way of thinking, and unfortunately, they grasp like dying swans in a cesspool of mud to Atlas Unshrugged/Unplugged....Ann Rand was a forwad thinking woman, the opposite of a Sarah Palin, and no one wants to see rehashed opinions of either....time to move forward into the next decade of the next century!

[Art Snob]

A,H. *was* conservative-leaning. Besides having been largely conceived by O'Rourke, what about the scene where Belushi-in-toga hears a hippie-ish student with a guitar singing a lame folk song, then proceeds to grab the guitar and smash it? What could be any plainer?

[wcmartell]

I just want to know where the $20m went. INSIDIOUS cost $800k and has a much better cast, SUPER was ultra-cheap and has a much better cast, a MOW these days cost about $1.2m (or less), and has much better casts. Though I have not seen this film, the reviews say it looks cheap... so with no one in the cast and no production value, what did they spend the $20m on?

And where are the Rand-fan stars who might do a role for scale?

Plus - Kyle Smith's review isn't exactly glowing.

[Marcus]

The critics correctly criticize Atlas Shrugged as a underwhelming theatrical spectacle. It is full of stilted dialogue. The characters are both unrealistic and simplistic. But for those who understand or who seek to understand the opposing economic forces of production and consumption, construction and destruction, investment and squander, this is an engaging story. This film is obviously more focused on presenting contrasting economic ideologies than entertainment. The only titillating thread of the plot is the question, "Who is John Galt?" Not having read the book, I have no idea. If there are no Parts 2 and 3, I regret that I may never find out.

[Stephan Pickering/Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham]

Shalom & Boker tov:

The problem with film-makers caught up in the Horrorwood vortex, is the profound intellectual vacuity. They move their lips, like stationary rocking horses, sometimes referring to Kabbalah (how many can read the Hebrew texts, or have studied Judaisms or Scholem?), pontificating that their Saturday matinee cosmology is, somehow, reality ('virtual reality' is an oxymoron). Now, we have Ayn Rand...again, it is the intrinsic problem with Horrorwood movies (which is not cinema): Spielberg, e.g., has few original ideas because they do not occur to him. In movies, the discussion of ideas stops prudcently before the parallelism becomes close enough to yield logical and probable conclusions.
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[Mike]

I dunno why anybody who saw this movie would get the idea that it was getting bad reviews because the "liberal" reviewers didn't care for the conservative message... The movie was just plain bad regardless of your political leanings.

I know the idea was supposed to be that the "good" capitalist was battling the forces of socialism, but the movie reduced both sides to such unrealistic caracatures that whatever message was intended was nearly completely obscured.