David McElroy

Lower your expectations.

Now lower them again. Then accept the idea that you can overlook some serious artistic mediocrity in some areas. If you’ll numb your judgement in these ways before going to see “Atlas Shrugged Part II,” there’s a chance you can enjoy it. Or at least parts of it.

Some books don’t make good movies. That’s what I said last year when I reviewed “Atlas Shrugged Part I,” and I feel that way even more strongly after watching “Part II” Friday afternoon.

If you’re a fan of the book — and you can see this movie as a paint-by-numbers adaptation of it — you’ll probably enjoy the movie. If you actually liked last year’s “Part I” (you know who you are), you’ll like this one just fine. But if you don’t already know and love the book, this movie will probably put you to sleep and make you curse whoever dragged you to the theatre to see it.

And that’s the bottom line. How much you enjoy this movie depends on the degree to which you’ll overlook its many flaws and grade it on a curve. It’s not a good film, but you can still enjoy parts of it if you lower expectations enough.

As a book, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is flawed, which should be apparent even to people (such as me) who love it. It’s not so much a novel as it’s a polemic. The characters don’t have depth. They’re simply two-dimensional representations of ideas that Rand moves around in order to make points. The good guys are completely good. The bad guys are completely evil. There are very few characters in the middle, and those few are portrayed as weak. There’s no character development.

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I won’t be publishing anything today, because I’m on a short vacation of sorts.

If you feel deprived, browse the old junk over on the right side of the page. There’s a lot of stuff you haven’t read before. Right?

I’ll be back from my dark little vacation hole before long, so I’ll talk with you again soon.

When you’re a kid, life seems to stretch out forever ahead of you. Waiting until Christmas is all you know of eternity. The idea of being old enough to live on your own is incomprehensible. As for older people who are in their declining years, they might as well be from another planet. You can’t imagine what they’ve seen and heard and felt and experienced.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Youth is wasted on the young,” and he was right. When we have youth, we’re not experienced enough or mature enough to appreciate it, but as we gain experience and maturity, we lose the youth which would allow us to make better decisions and spend our time in ways that would lead to wiser outcomes.

When I was 20, I thought I was pretty smart and pretty wise. By the time I hit 30, I was wise enough to know how ignorant I’d been at 20, but I was arrogant enough to believe I’d learned enough by then.

The only thing I understand now is that age and wisdom can be proportional. It isn’t always true, it’s possible. I’ve known some people who become adults and quit learning and growing. I’ve said for years that most people I know hit the age of 30 and then just get numb and get involved with the pragmatic part of life — and quit changing. Over the next 30 years, they don’t get 30 years of experience. They get one year of experience 30 times.

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