He killed Laura Palmer.

He is also amaaaaaaazing in Twin Peaks as Laura Palmer's dad.

>:(

Leland gots to get paid.

He was also the best Devil this side of Tom Waits and Danny Elfman, so he has experience

They're attempting to ride pre-election anti Obama sentiments. I'm surprised they didn't cast a black man to play the president.

So what you're saying is... money is only the defining salvation of a thing if it's a thing we all agree on anyway, right?

They're trying to make a statement and in film the statement can't be made if hardly anyone sees it. Ticket and DVD sales = money and influence.

They are making a statement. According to the box office take, that statement is, at best, "we live in a fantasy land" and at worst "we're delusional sociopaths and all of our beliefs about how the world should work are privileged elitist bullshit."

It's happened before. It's said that the Civil War wouldn't have happened if the North hadn't read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the South hadn't read "Ivanhoe".

Art is beyond entertainment. It both reflects and influences culture.

It's highly doubtful that Uncle Tom's resulted in the war. It may have sped it up by a couple of years or so, but it was going to happen either way.

Lincoln, who was far more of a smartass than people give him credit for, greeted the author of the book when he first met her by saying "so you're the little woman who caused this great war!"

Cena ..... what?

Wow... I think I would have literally slapped Abraham Lincoln if I had been her.

Wouldn't be the first time.

All the stuff I've read about CEO-types is that their complete detachment from humanity is shocking. Like, they tend to send their children to learning academies, never read books for pleasure, can't do simple math, can't cook food, don't know how to drive, etc. They seem to live in a world of isolation that's unfathomable for a well adjusted, normal human being.

Naturally, we should look to them for policy advice.

It's estimated that most of them are psychopaths. Modern psychology has come so far. Unfortunately our society has not caught up and done anything about it. This is not a comforting post.

I know for a fact that the CEO of IBM has severe brain damage from a motorcycle accident in the mid 80s and can't retain anything for more than 10 to 15 minutes.

Also, I think it bears sharing that I had the song "We Don't Care" by MGMT stuck in my head while I was watching this.

Wow, insult to injury, eh?

they probaby stretched it to four hours

For you.

I didn't notice that, but that is HILARIOUS.

Except you still had exemptions for expenditures on building your business. Made a factory? That's a tax credit. Hired more people? Okay, tax credit.

It was basically business expenses that were deductible when businesses actually made stuff, built stuff, and hired people. Now, they're one to five person outfits that play video poker with spreadsheets and make up new "products" that cause bubbles and sink the economy. They've used their money to decrease their tax rates to far below 15%. They buy laws that favor them at the expense of just about the entire country.

And it seems to escape everyone's notice that even with higher tax rates, there wasn't really a shortage of people trying to be and becoming rich. There was also a thriving middle class, more social services, better public education, etc.

Well, I can't speak to the state of corporate welfare in 1957, and I'm not suggesting that Ayn Rand was correct in her analysis. I'm suggesting that, 50 years ago, there may have been some relationship to reality. I'm suggesting that, ATLAS SHRUGGED may have spoken to Ayn Rand's time, but it doesn't speak to our time, at least not in the way that is being suggested.

Her entire philosophy is a bitter response to socialism, in which she regresses to exactly what the socialists were trying to fight. I don't think their is really any credit deserved on her part.

Yes. Exactly, Konversekid. Exactly. She traded in one form of fascism for another and didn't notice any problem with a few people making decisions for all of humanity with a hugely unbalanced proportion of resources going for those few. Fuck her dead stupid corpse and the bloated egos of her willing followers, most of whom do not benefit from those ideals once they latch onto them.

One other thing on that 90% figure: That's the tax rate for an amount of money over a certain threshold. Let's say the tax rate is 90% on income over million, but only 60% at million and then 30% at million. You're only paying 90% on million. You're still bloody effing rich, and that's before you devote that 90% million to something that gets a tax break.

Not to mention we're talking dollars when a dollar could buy you a decent meal.

Nietzsche would have said that Ayn Rand instituted slavery based upon the human drive to be a slave, and the proper response would be slaughter all the Randroids to attain actual humanity.

Or at least that's what I'm going to tell people, because they're both dead now and can't stop me.

I thought he was insinuating he wants some head.