Ayn Rand.

Since I finished another essay I thought I could afford another blog entry. Because this is important.

As I suppose most of you already know, Atlas Shrugged is being turned into a movie. A movie that actually looks really good and promising - which is hard to imagine considering the magnitude of the book. Luckily for me, it was ages ago since I read Atlas Shrugged, so any inaccuracies won't be that painful. To be honest, I didn't actually finish it. Rand's books are notoriously difficult to read because they exhaust you emotionally, and this book is over a thousand pages long so there's room for lots of exhausting material. Rand does not like her characters to be happy. What I read (800-900 pages or so), however, was brilliant. Naturally, I'm going to finish it one day. The movie that is out now is, after all, only part one, so I figure I have some time.

It can be difficult to adapt to the actors that have been chosen to play characters from a book, since you already know what those people looked like in your head. I must say, however, that the actors appear to be extremely well-chosen for Atlas Shrugged. Dagny may be a little bit too beautiful and soft around the edges - I can't really remember - but Rearden is perfect.



I think I discovered Ayn Rand when I was 15 or 16. Perhaps 17. I can't remember who mentioned the book to me or how I ended up reading it, but I borrowed it at the library and I remembered it was huge and had a somewhat weird cover. This was in high school, when we didn't have all that much to do and I could spend a lot of time reading. And I remember falling ill. I think it was a throat infection of some sort, I'm quite prone to those. Since I come from a family that waits until we start to decompose before we go to the doctor, I was in a rather miserable state and could absolutely not sleep because of the pain, so I read The Fountainhead until 5 a.m. or something like that and forgot about how miserable I was. Ever since then I have loved Rand's books, and it's only a shame that there are so few of them.

In Russia, I stumbled upon We The Living in Dom Knigi on Nevskij Prospekt. I think I just cast a glance towards a pile of books and noticed that the name of the author was very weird-looking in Russian. Then I realized that name was Ayn Rand, who is actually Russian to begin with. And how appropriate to read her first book, set in St. Petersburg, in Russian! I very much enjoyed the book, even if it does not reach the same standard as the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

In other news, HBO is turning A Game of Thrones into a TV series. This is also very, very interesting.

Reprise.

The other day I saw a movie that I liked very much on Swedish television. It was the Norwegian movie "Reprise", and unfortunately I missed the beginning. It's a movie about a group of young, intellectual men, and their attempts at writing literature and living in general. One of them (who could perhaps be called the main main character, out of two) writes a book that gets published and is declared a genius, but then meets a girl, and when falling in love with her, his mental breakdown is triggered. This is kind of the background setting for the development of the other main character as well, who strives to get published and still be supportive of his friend.

I was very impressed with this movie. It's delightfully made, the actors are great and the excellent narrative technique even adds a bit humor every once in a while, even though this is a rather sad movie. Still, it's not a depressing one, and it's actually hard to actually say what kind of movie it is. I found it to be uplifting and inspiring, but I suspect not everyone would share that opinion.

One of the characters I especially liked was the very serious and super intellectual Hitler Jugend looking Lars (who is later in the movie nicknamed "Porn-Lars", which is just incredibly perfect since it clashes completely with the nature of his character) who thinks that women are unable of intellectual achievements, that they are just creatures that can be filled up with knowledge by men, but can never think anything up on their own. His comment about how women in the eastern part of Oslo (the poorer part where all the immigrants live, and kind of where I live as well) at least acknowledge their inferiority and don't pretend to participate in the conversations of the "grown-ups" is excellent.

Here is an article about the movie (in Norwegian) and a scene from it.

Everyone with an interest in "intellectual" movies, that is slow ones without any extreme drama or action, should definitely watch this one. It kind of made me think of a book that I (along with everyone who has ever read it I guess) am a huge fan of: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Are there any other books or movies that deal with groups of intellectual (and sometimes decadent) young people?