Rand's message isn't accurate anymore

The thoughts of an expatriate are regaining importance to many Americans this week, as a new Ayn Rand biography is released. Rand, whose philosophies have come to represent an entire generation of conservatives, is closely followed by modern conservative power brokers such as Glen Beck and Alan Greenspan.

Many of Rand's ideas involve thinking that government is little more than a concentrated power sucker and that individual freedoms are central to living life as it is. Ironically, however, Rand refused to allow her followers to think for themselves, meaning that she didn't follow the typical notion of practicing what you preach.

Rand's philosophies may have some merit in modern America, as it is beginning to look more and more like a country in desperate need of hope may have crowned a false messiah. The basic problem with Rand's ideas, though, is that when put into effect result in little more than chaos, not some paradise where all men are created equal.

Rand's ideas are so popular because they emerged from the fringe, from a spot where a young girl watched her father's pharmacy taken from under his nose by the government that was supposed to be protecting him. They did not, however, anticipate a world with the complexities and sophistication that ours has. It isn't an understatement to say that the last decade have been the busiest in human history.

Unfortunately, nobody quite knows the answers to the questions that need to be asked about the economy, or the environment or other tricky issues. Part of this is that we are still figuring out the questions that need to be asked.

Unfortunately for Rand and her followers, though, the answer is not a return to some archaic mode of thought. The world isn't going to get any simpler, as the webs that link us all are going to become more and more intertwined in the near future. The answer to solving the weaknesses in those webs is not to burn them down and walk away, but to take a step back and realize what needs to be solved.

Rand makes some valid points, but ideas that may have made sense in a cleaner world only further muddy the scene today.

Should children's classics be made into films?

It seems as if Hollywood is running out of original source material and, in a desperate effort to regenerate interest in non-Pixer blockbuster films, is turning to the one genre that people of all ages could enjoy: the children's classics.

Perennial favorites such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox have either all been made into or are in the process of being made into feature films, and this may indicate a disturbing future for these stories.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is the first one of the three to have come out and, considering that it was not only my favorite as a child but that it's a claymation film, I am not interested in seeing it. I recall Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs as an unintentionally dark tale of greed and unintended consequences, but the film has turned it into a fun romp featuring actors like Mr. T and Anna Faris. Furthermore, the film suffers from not being live action. Much of the draw of making the classic children's book into a movie would be showing the massive pancakes slowly floating over the town like suffering zeppelins or showing boulder-sized meatballs forcing families inside by landing violently in front yards.

Maybe this would make the story a bit too dark, but it would certainly make the world hunger subplot more prescient than the silly and outdated claymation style does.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox will also suffer from this, but hopefully the Wes Anderson-written script will protect the aesthetic of the Roald Dahl novel without sacrificing any of the book's relatability. One thing that I am worried about, particularly with this film, is Hollywood's effect on the film. Dahl, who also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its much darker sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, didn't write time-wasting dialogue into his novels. Instead, he wrote frank and clear conversation that advanced the plot. Having playful, wasteful conversation would completely ruin the story, and Anderson must be aware of that.

Ironically, at least for me, Where the Wild Things Are could be the most successful and accurate of the movies, actually adding to the value of its source material as opposed to detracting from it. As a child, I never enjoyed Maurice Sendak's novel. Something about the large, furry creatures just seemed odd to me, maybe because I was freaked out by them or maybe because I didn't quite understand just why they were there. Unlike the other two films, though, Where the Wild Things Are is live-action, giving it the benefit of added believability (and, therefore, added meaning) when compared to its two brethren.

I'm not sure that the Spike Jonze adaptation will be the gift to film that some seem to think it will be, but out of these three films it certainly seems like it will be the most entertaining and potentially important. The goal of any adaptation should be not only to do justice to the original story, but also to give it additional meaning and to open the story to new audiences. Unfortunately, only one of these films seems guaranteed to succeed on that goal.

Can Dan Brown save the blockbuster novel?

The death of the novel is something that critics have shouted about from rooftops for decades, claiming that the publishing industry is steadily grinding its way towards an anticlimactic demise, certain to be replaced by Kindles, e-books and other technology. To make matters worse, the only person in the entire world who is able to convince the American public that reading is a worthwhile endeavor is Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsement typically results in more than a million additional sales for a book (even though Oprah couldn't even convince America that Faulkner is worth reading).

Outside of Oprah stepping in, however, the blockbuster novel is essentially a thing of the past in America. Sure, Nicholas Sparks, James Patterson, the most recent entry in the Twilight series and the newest right wing propaganda roll of toilet paper will always sell copies. These are not, however, the books that people talk about. These are books that you read once and donate to your local library, hoping that nobody sees you furtively scanning the pages on the bus ride to work.

Dan Brown, however, seems to have somehow found the key to America's wallets. It turns out that if you lace a high-paced adventure with a story involving the church, large self-flagellating eunuchs and a dorky professor who nobody would actually like in real life (sort of like any athlete, but that's for another time) lacrosse moms everywhere will shell out 30 bucks a pop to read an absurd story. Seriously, though, Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, has somehow sold "well over" one million copies.

The thinking, though, is that some kids out there will become excited about reading by Brown's novel and maybe start along the winding path towards "literature." Heck, they may even read the book on a Kindle and actually start buying books again.

I'm not sure, though, if the blockbuster novel is a reality anymore. For any fervent reader, there is already too much stuff out there, and Amazon has made everything extremely accessible. Every two years or so, a phenom like a Dan Brown novel or the newest Harry Potter (yes, I know the series is over) comes out, but the people who are reading those books are doing so more so that they can feel as if they are riding some type of paper-driven wave instead of actually sparking some type of revival of the novel.

Fiction as an art form will be alive and well as long as there are pockets of people who believe that the written word has the power to cure all. And, for what it's worth, if you are reading this post, I hope you are one of those people. The future of the novel does not reside in blockbusters, which are essentially the pop music of books, but in the novels that somehow provide us all with the sense that someone out there somehow gets it and, in turn, gets us.

After all, that's all that we really want.