And She's Stone Cold!

That would describe Mother Nature right now. It's freakin' freezing out there right now, and I can't bring myself to actually go outside for any length of time. Vices is going okay, here's a few of the movies we've watched so far, with a brief review:

1. The Fountainhead. As many of you may or may not know, I despise Ayn Rand (the idiotic Pollyanna atheist and founder of the objectivist school of thought). I find her ideas insipid and ridiculously optimistic, indeed, groundlessly so. She goes on about how there is no God, but that there is an objective truth about human nature. While she borrows some elements of the Nietzschean master morality (i.e., emphasis on pride), she is unwilling to look at the inherent contradictions in her logic. I believe she had an insufficient experience of human depravity. For instance, she believes that all things should be done for their own sake, as intellectual exercises and such. Indeed, she blames all the horrors of the world on people conforming to the herd. While many horrors have resulted from such actions, she forgets such things as the Manhattan Project scientists, who engaged in the creation of the atomic bomb as just the sort of intellectual exercise she says is always blameless.
Philosophical beefs aside, I found the movie to be poorly written, with shoddy dialogue and wooden acting all around. While Rand attatches her name to the production as a screenwriter and producer, this is clearly not something to be proud of. Characters do not so much interact with one another as pontificate in long-winded disertations bearing little resemblance to normal human conversation. While such speech would be appropriate amongst fellows of a philosophical circle, they do not fit well when spoken by architects, heiresses, and media moguls in normal everyday discourse.

2. Dangerous Liasons. This movie reminded me of nothing so much as John Lovitt's old SNL "Tales of Ribaldry" sketches. An otherwise stellar cast was unfortunately marred by the presence of Keanu Reeves, who sticks out like a sore thumb. Seriously, he talks in the exact same way as he did in "Bill and Ted." It really ruins a moment when you could insert the phrase "Dude" at the end of dialogue intended to take place in seventeenth-century France. Other than that, it consisted of French aristocracy engaging in all sorts of sexual intrigue and the like. If this is all they ever did, no wonder the French Revolution was so popular. After seeing this movie, I had to fight the strange urge to head over to the guillotine myself and decapitate a few aristo's of my own. Or maybe just castrate them. The endless incest and anti-intellectualism just got on my nerves, really.