Right Wing Movies & the 2012 Election

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Obama's America, a documentary based largely upon Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage. It is an examination of the roots of President Obama's ideology. To quote the New York Times:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/08/1...ica-by-dinesh-dsouza.html?partner=rss&emc=rss​

And to quote National Review:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314624/un-american-vision-barack-obama-thomas-sowell​

[video=youtube;hfLsSg9wZlE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLsSg9wZlE&feature=player_embedded[/video]​

This movie has so far only had a limited release, but it's already the number 2 documentary of the year. It came in at number 3 in Union Square right behind The Dark Knight and Total Recall and will be going national this Friday.

If that's not enough red meat for the Republican base, we also have Atlas Shrugged Part 2 coming out this October.

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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/atlas-shrugged-part-2-prduction-april-286633​

[video=youtube;Eo8SuRgqdTI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo8SuRgqdTI&feature=player_embedded#![/video]​

What effect, if any, do you think these movies will have on the election? And, are the movies any good?

 

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Less effect than those who made them would like.

 

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What I don't understand--and maybe Madanthonywayne can shed some light on this for me--is the object of these films. Anyone with a brain knows that these are hard-right propaganda films. If you wanted to find a music equivalent, it would be on par with the Hate Rock movement within Skinhead subculture. That is to say, it isn't seeking to find an audience as much as it is trying to empower those already converted. Would that be an accurate assessment of what these kinds of movies try to accomplish, or do you think the people behind them really believe the stuff they're selling and are actually trying to make a difference?

 

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They appear to be visual incarnations of the Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/Faux News bashathons that have been going on ever since voters turned out and took control of the government in 2008.

If I were unsure about the turning out to vote this year, watching this garbage would make me want to plan on calling in sick, if necessary, just to shut these meatheads up.

Just like most propaganda, it eventually backfires.

 

Yeah but this stuff doesn't even come close to the social penetration that talk radio and cable news, does it?

My point is that I can't tell whether the delusion is genuine, or if they know they're just preaching to the choir.

 

In nearly four years, with about half of his peak access to power used up, President Obama has no comparison to the Eisenhower era fears of the military-industrial complex. Taxes have remained flat and nothing internally sinister has been noted in the US. The worst heartburn is that folks have to belly up to the bar and make sure they're covered with health insurance. A ton of other complaints have been lodged but they're mostly invented. If the Bushies hadn't allowed the mortgage backed securities fraud to perpetuate, we' all be rolling in clover right now.

I would nominate The Exorcist, specifically the scene with the girl hurling bile while her read spins around, as the movie scene that best characterizes right wing reaction to the very mild progressive changes in the government since George the Terrible left office. Let us not forget the refused handshakes and the thrown shoes, and compare this to the huge reception Barack Obama received all over the world, most notable in Germany. Right wing America is truly appalling to the world. We might need another movie to represent that, either the Andromeda Strain, symbolizing infectious right wing fear gone awry, or perhaps the Manchurian Candidate, symbolizing the latent danger of the sleeping cells of Republicans who are triggered, zombie-like, by program phrases like "Big Government".

 

That's very likely. Who would even bother to look for these and sit through them?

Yeah, because this junk has no merit, no substance, so a center or left leaning person won't likely pay it any mind. That leaves the instigators to be preaching to the choir. No doubt there's a lot of delusion among the little people, the ones who are buying the propaganda, and the party bosses would seem to be deluding themselves into remaining attached to the right during one of its worst political eras ever. Those two aspects seem to be the mainstay of right wing politics.

 

I watched Dinesh get destroyed by Hitchens in a debate about religion. I no longer respected a thing about him other than his meticulous grasp of the English language and his ability to use it with aplomb. Other than that, he's just a religious hack, and a hack that used to bang horse-face Ann Coulter.

~String

 

Gawd, slam-dunk again, string. You planted this thought in my mind: I wonder what historians will write about these times after people move on? What else, other than to characterize this as an era of high "acting out" by super-naive reactionaries? I mean, just look at how many people are buying their garbage and swallowing it whole. They are largely pandering to mean dummies and mean self-righteous bigots, xenophobes, and knuckleheads in general. That seems to account for at least 40% of the population.

 

I don't know anything about Dinesh D’Souza or his movie, but it has been a dream of Ayn Rand fans that a movie might be made of Atlas Shrugged for years. The timing of the movie's release is probably meant to try to get more publicity for it. Plus, I doubt many Ayn Rand fans are Obama supporters, so if the release of the movie has some impact on the election, even better.

 

than i feel sorry for those fans because atlas shrugged is poorly written trash. and no that's not a critque of her philsopohy which is borderline sociopatic but a pure crticque based solely on the writing.

 

How did Atlas Part I work out for you? Despite the hopes of folks like you Atlas Part I was a total flop. I remember your disappointment when it was released. You had hoped as you are now hoping that it would set fire to your Randian values. But it was a bore and it was a monumental flop. This whole devotion to a novel reminds me of a religion that began with science fiction novels – Scientology.

It is fascinating; people take a complete work of fiction and attempt to make it a reality.

 

Neither of these movies are going to make any impact on the election, because they are both determined exercises in preaching to the choir. The names "Dinesh D'Souza" and "Ayn Rand" are strong signifiers that reliably chase away anyone who doesn't already agree with what they are going to say.

The Atlas Shrugged movies are probably the most well-funded fan-fic movies ever produced, though. But I think it was a huge mistake for them to break it up into multiple movie productions, since none of the movies will then stand on their own (the first one certainly did not). Also didn't the entire cast of the first one decline to participate in the second? I'm given to believe it's an entirely different cast and crew, which is kind of hilarious in how it drives home what a flop the first one was. Some review somewhere noted how dated the book itself is and how incongrous the modern production ends up - it's all about railway and steel barons!

To that: if some private entrepreneurs spend a bunch of money to make a movie to advance the ideas of Ayn Rand, and that movie is a market failure, doesn't that imply that Ayn Rand's ideology is a failure on its own terms? Or just that these particular filmmakers are not the Randian ubermenschen that objectivists all like to imagine that they are?

 

Not necessarily because they did get to make and distribute the movie to the citizens which didn't attend for various reasons. Some reasons include how many theaters were used to display this film, many times only a handful of theaters allow certain movies to be shown. So were there thousands of theaters that showed this film like Total Recall was....NO! So another reason would be marketing this film and where those markets were located to view this film, were the theaters out west in small towns or just where were they located because that makes a big difference to market strategies.

 

But the entire reason more theaters didn't show the film is exactly because they did not expect that doing so would be profitable for them. There is no conspiracy of movie theaters to shut this thing down - they make those decisions based on their estimates of the audience for a given film.

Likewise, if this was just a matter of theater access, the movie should have done very well on DVD. It has not.

 

Whenever something doesn't go there way, it has to be a conspiracy.

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They couldn't be wrong.

"Box office

The U.S. release of Atlas Shrugged: Part I was regarded as a "flop".[25] It opened on 300 screens on April 15, 2011, and made US$1,676,917 in its opening weekend, finishing in 14th place overall.[26] Producers announced expansion to 423 theaters several days after release and promised 1,000 theaters by the end of April,[27] but the release peaked at 465 screens. Ticket sales dropped off significantly in its second week of release, despite 165 additional screens; after six weeks, the film showed on only 32 screens and total ticket sales had not crossed the $5 million mark, recouping less than a quarter of the production budget.[28]" - Wikipedia

 

Since I'm not privy as to who runs the theaters and how they can determine what will fail and what won't, I can't really say for certain why many theaters did not show this movie. You say that this wasn't a good movie but neither was AI and I Robot but they were still shown and did a modest business. The DVD sales is based largly upon movie sales and marketing. Since there weren't many theaters showing this film them the sales of DVD's would almost be down.

 

It doesn't matter if you think AI and I Robot were worse movies, they had a better box office. They made money. They had an audience.

 

So you simply assume it wasn't the fact that the theaters did not see much of a market for this movie?

The point was not that it's a bad movie - although it is that - but that it's an unsuccessful, unappealing movie. The same cannot be said about AI or I Robot. Although I'm not going to defend their cinematic quality, they clearly offer something in the way of entertainment value. The theaters recognized that, and ran it accordingly, and made money. I am confident that if Atlas Shrugged had done well in the theatrical run that it did have, more theaters would have picked it up. That is what normally happens with viable movies that aren't able to garner a big initial release.

You'll need to support that assertion. There are ample examples of movies and shows that have flopped in the primary market, but become cult hits on DVD and made big money there. That is what I'd expect to happen, if this is truly an appealing movie that simply ran afoul of poor marketting or distaste from theater owners. It had a dedicated fanbase built-in from the moment production began, after all.

But, I don't notice you actually coming out and asserting that Atlas Shrugged was a good, or entertaining, or otherwise marketable movie that would have succeeded if it had enjoyed a broader theatrical run. Do you, or do you not, agree with the statement that it is a turd with extremely limited market appeal?

 

Yes, but isn't there some benefit to "preaching to the choir" in terms of enthusiasm and turn out?

Atlas Shrugged is a mixture of scifi and philosophy. While the philosophy may be timeless, scifi has a definite expiration date. They could have turned the railroad into an airline or something like that and perhaps the Rearden metal could have been the key to a new line of super-sonic jets. But that would have required a major rewrite which might have turned off some of the fans.

Cute. You are, of course, ignoring the fact that the novel is one of the best selling novels of all time. Clearly the ideology is not a market failure. But some books are just tough to translate to the big screen.