Nearly every film fan that I know is excited about the fact that the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is going to be available for viewing today. Everyone, that is, but me. To me, Lincoln sounds like yet another big-budget, self-conscious prestige film that was primarily made to win awards (and considering just how weak this year has been so far, it may very well do that). Lincoln sounds like a film that people will respect but never actually enjoy.
Add to that, this is an election year and I know I’m not looking forward to having to listen to all the toadsuckers comparing their particular candidate to Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. Seriously, it’s going to get tedious.
(That said, I seriously hope that I’m wrong because I’m a lover of both film and history. It’s not the film’s subject matter that concerns me as much as it’s the deafening hype that surrounds the film and demands that I love it before I even see it.)
As soon as the trailer for Lincoln is available on YouTube, either myself or another Shattered Lens will undoubtedly share it on this site. For now, however, I’m going to share another recently released trailer for another film about politics.
If Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 is anything like the first film in the trilogy, it’ll be the type of trashy, low-budget fun that always manages to annoy the usual gang of complacent critical elitists. If nothing else, it should be interesting to see just how overwrought the reaction (both pro and con) will be to this particular film.
Through the Shattered Lens 
who is John Galt?
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Who is John Galt? To be honest, after seeing the first film, my reaction was “who cares?” I normally love precisely this type of low-budget trash, and while I have no particular love for the cult of Rand, the fact is, I heartily enjoy nemrous grindhouse and exploitation films that are of far more questionable political pedigree than this series (“Cannibal Holocaust” anyone?) That being said, the cardinal sin the first movie committed was, in my view, being just plain dull, as all the characters displayed a tendency to stop the movie in order to deliveer extended political harangues on the moral necessity of — I dunno, letting rich people keep all their money or something, I guess, and how civilization flat-out deserves to crumble if we don’t let them. I can live with a preachy flick, but only if it manages to use its story to convey its message rather than using its story merely as as window dressing to absolutely drum home its message, if that makes any sense. Frankly I enjoy deeply polarizing work for its own sake, but “Atlas Shrugged, Part 2” needs to do a better job of being more movie and less sermon-for-the-already-converted if it wants to maintain my interest, even if the lousy acting and questionable-at-best CGI were fun in a cheesy, SyFy-Saturday-night-movie sort of way. I’m not saying tone the political content down — just present it in a less blatant, hammer-to-the-head manner.
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