marknyc

I've always despised Ayn Rand's philosophical ideas, so I avoided watching "The Fountainhead". I finally saw it today, and was shocked. As expected, it promoted her toxic viewpoints, but I was surprised to find that it is also a truly awful film. The screenplay (by Rand based on her novel) is ridiculous: the situations are absurdly extreme and the characters are nothing more than cardboard cut-outs who exist only to espouse Rand's ideas. Seriously, how could Cooper and Neal read that dialogue, which sounds like a high-schooler wrote it? Word is that Lauren Bacall was going to be cast, but backed out (probably after she read the hopelessly embarrassing script). How did this ever get made??

I tried watching this for awhile....but Mark Cousin is such a horrible narrator I had to give up. Not only is the language florid, but he goes up on the end of each and every sentence! Each one sounds like a question. It's so annoying that you want to stick your fingers in your ears. What a bad choice. A narrator for such a long series as this is critical, and it's literally impossible to listen to him for hours on end. In addition, much of the material covered has been covered better elsewhere. Perhaps with a better narrator I could slog through it, but I just couldn't take it with is voice droning on and on. Maybe I should try with the sound down and closed captioning on!

I have to disagree with the poster who wrote that Dean Stockwell doesn't look remotely Japanese. It was great casting, as Stockwell's eyes didn't require that much makeup to look Asian, and the work that was done on them was done extremely well. In fact, I caught this episode on TV in the middle and thought that they had cast a Japanese actor in the second part! The episode itself falls prone to Serling's not uncommon habit of hitting you over the head with his point. The American Stockwell and the Japanese commander are so extreme as to be cardboard cutouts. But I guess subtlety wasn't really the point of "The Twilight Zone".