Yes, turning a didactic book with complex political, economic, and ethical themes into a fast-moving story was a challenge. “Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part I” looks sometimes rushed, and the necessity to push a lot of Rand’s secondary characters to the rear behind the foreground Hank Rearden-Dagny Taggart romance in order to pick up the […]
Ayn Rand attempted something so massive in “Atlas Shrugged” that, for 50 years, no one could figure out how to film it. And I don’t mean just that it’s a thousand-page book. Growing up in late Czarist Russia, Rand saw how socialism could destroy not just an economy, but the moral framework of a nation. […]
Eighteen-year Las Vegas police officer Laurie Bisch keeps running for sheriff against her boss, Doug Gillespie. She says her independent attitude sometimes makes her feel “like a woman without a country” when she goes to work — though other officers have been known to approach her in private and thank her for raising issues others […]
One unidentified businessman claimed to be uncomfortable about relocating to a Nevada county where brothels are legal, so U.S. Sen. Harry Reid lectured state legislators in Carson City Wednesday (to a response of deafening silence) that Nevada should outlaw and close the 28 legal brothels that now pay local taxes and fees — some of […]
On Sept. 28 a Clark County coroner’s inquest jury predictably found three Las Vegas Metro police officers did nothing criminal when they shot and killed West Point graduate Erik Scott as he exited a suburban Costco store shortly after high noon on Saturday, July 10. Medical testimony established the 38-year-old Scott was stewed to the […]
What ever happened to Mark OToole? No, not the Mark O’Toole with the apostrophe before the “T,” bass player for the rock band Frankie Goes to Hollywood. We’re talking about the vocalist Mark OToole who won Ed McMahon’s Star Search competition back in 1994, came to Vegas, put together a band, and has played almost […]
In last week’s column, I’d walked into a local comics shop with some “Silver Age” Marvel and D.C. comic books from the early 1960s, comics with 10-cent cover prices theoretically cataloguing at hundreds of dollars each, but actually in typical “fair to very good” worn condition and thus not likely to retail at more than […]
At the local mutiplex, the tightly edited “coming attractions” are often better than the real movies they advertise. Unfortunately, when today’s real-world “coming attractions” feature a fast-devaluating dollar, means-testing of “entitlements” (come back and let us know when you’ve sold your house and you’re living under the bridge), making it a crime to “hoard” wealth […]
In North Las Vegas, as in most places, the recession is causing tax revenues to fall. The city has undergone five rounds of budget trims since December, 2008, and now aims to cut an additional $33.4 million from planned spending to make it through fiscal year 2011. So the city announced this month it might […]
Retro clothes are not vintage clothes. Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era — often, the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an […]