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I finished Ayn Rand’s Anthem over the weekend.

My opinion — and I say this as a guy with a shelf full of Ayn Rand’s writing, with no political axe to grind and with a generally favorable opinion of her work — is that it’s terrible. Embarassingly terrible. If Rand was any older than 15 when she wrote this, she has no excuse. When the protagonist renames himself “Prometheus,” you’ll literally be checking the margins for scribbled notes to Suzy and scratches of “AR + FO” surrounded by little hearts.

If you’re unfamiliar with Anthem, it’s a slim novella set in a dystopian alternate history where the State has fully embraced collectivism to the point that society has actually moved backwards, though without any observed (by the reader) violence. It’s a parable, if you will. Ayn Rand’s nice way of saying that without individualism we’ll all have numbers for names and use candles for light since the collective cannot agree on the benefits of electricity. It’s her 1984, her Animal Farm, her Fahrenheit 451 — sorta.

That I see it on Back to School Reading List displays at bookstores each year only confirms my long-held bias that what they have you read in schools is shit. And makes me want to go back to Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 and see if they really were as crappy as I figure they were. (I’ve never read 1984 but Monty read it recently and told me it was pretty stupid.)

Anthem is a sample chapter of a larger work. It needs fleshing out or throwing away. There are no characters. There is no plot, no drama. There is no depth. Just an idea. And it’s an idea that conflicts with its own presentation.

What I mean is: Rand barely develops her idea of the individual against the state through her first-person narrator before the events of her novel twist it. The protagonist gives at least a chapter’s worth of the usual Rand egoism speech (John Galt-light here) before he’s moving into someone else’s abandoned house and reading all their books. Man, that self-sufficiency didn’t last long.

A much more interesting route to take would be to read the narrator’s developing understanding of how individualism benefits a society. How the individual freedom of men and women actually benefits the world at large. How collectivism hampers the progress of the very society it claims to uphold. How collectivism isn’t really about doing good but about power. Plain and brutal power.

Rand can’t develop that idea because she’s just spent a significant amount of space having this guy decry the entire world outside himself. Everything is bad, he figures, except the individual. Her protagonist discovers a whole world of innovation but he simply appropriates it as his own under a philosophy he’s just barely started exploring. It reminds me of that line in the much more intellectually-challenging Jurassic Park when Malcolm makes the statement about Hammond’s scientists. Something along the lines that they didn’t do the research that led to their discovery so they don’t have any respect for it.

That’s Rand’s protagonist right there. What’s going to happen in a year after he’s lived in a house he didn’t build made of material he doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe? There’s your damn novel. That’s interesting. The stuff of Anthem is child’s play next to that kind of conflict.

Watching Casino Royale makes it clear that there are really two schools of Bond movies split along the lines of the character’s greatest actors: Connery and Moore. Ask anyone who is the quintessential Bond and the answer inevitably comes back: Connery. But Moore was a Bond for his time — a foppish, kind of twatish Bond and as one of my peers in a literary theory class put it years ago “much more condescending than Connery.” He was, though it pains me to say it, basically a ridiculously-dressed jerk. Yet oddly acceptable in the role.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see Lazenby was of the Connery school (as there was no other school at the time). Bond in the 60s was stern yet charming. He was the cruel, cold agent that Ian Fleming created. Timothy Dalton, for all his faults (which were largely the faults of the movies themselves), was also of the Connery school.

Brosnan, it pains me none to say, was of the Moore school. I might accept the argument that he was a Connery actor trapped in Moore films, but that doesn’t change the fact that he drove an invisible car, pronounced asinine one-liners and goofed-off with a Q who once taught a nation to walk silly.

The opening sequence of Casino Royale immediately had this Connery fan hoping against hope that he was about to witness the return of the old school. Yet as the movie progressed along those old school lines, I became irritated with a new thought: why the hell didn’t they do this ten years ago? Why did it take four basically stupid Brosnan films for us to wind up with the Bond we all knew we should have seen in 1995?

Perhaps, like our political pendulum swinging from tax-and-spender to tax-cutter-and-spender, or Van Halen’s lead singer pendulum swinging from goofball to douchebag, our Bond actors need to swing from Connery to Moore archetype with each generation. Or perhaps, and this is just a shot in the dark, the powers-that-be are idiots just like us.

Regardless, Casino Royale never falls prey to the temptation to ham it up. Nor does its star Daniel Craig. If anything, he’s almost robotic, a Terminator with an understandable accent. There is no Q. There are no cartoonish sex scenes. There are no quips. It’s almost weird. When Bond brings a airport fueling truck to a screeching halt a few feet from a new airliner, I truly expected to hear him offer the pilot a “top-off.”

Casino Royale also pulls off something unseen since the Connery days: it actually pulls from its source material. And I don’t mean the Woody Allen movie. Unfortunately for me, a fan of Fleming’s novels, the movie is not simply a cinematic retelling of the novel (which would have been fantastic). Instead they’ve squished the action of the novel into the middle of a big, huge bang-up of an action movie. The novel is much quieter and creepier. In the film, the creepiest detail is seeing Bond and Le Chiffre playing Texas Hold ‘Em. I shudder to imagine such a scene in a Brosnan movie where Joe Don Baker would inevitably appear in a ten-gallon hat to say something like, “Bond, you wily old coot, lemme buy you a sasparilla!” I still get chills thinking of it.

Except for a confusing, too-chaotic ending that is still satisfactory, Casino Royale delivers everything we’ve ever wanted in a Bond film and more importantly excludes all the bullshit that the Moore school of films canonized. It leaves the Bond fan with one question:

Why in the effing, bloody hell would they not dye Craig’s hair black for the role?

Bond is not a blonde.

The movie has ruffled the feathers of Kazakhstan’s president and only highlighted that country’s illiberal treatment of media. But portraying the movie as somehow anti-Kazakhstani ignores how hilariously anti-American it is. In other words, both cultures get a proper skewering. In fact, one could argue that the Americans get skewered more since the scenes in “Kazakhstan” weren’t even shot there and it’s plain that those scenes are fictitious while the scenes of Borat interacting with Americans blur the lines between reality and fiction with clever edits and set-ups. Even when you’re pretty sure you’re watching something that’s been set-up (the American prostitute, for example), the edits and the tone of the film work to keep you guessing.

So much of the film’s comedy relies on the surprise at seeing him do or say something completely out of the realm of good taste that it’s difficult to discuss the film. I don’t want to give anything away. Simply put, it makes Team America look like a training video on multi-cultural tolerance.

In an age when cultural sensitivity has been taken to a ruthless extreme, it’s shocking to watch a movie that isn’t in the least bit aware of political correctness. But that’s the film Cohen has made. One whose comedy shocks the breath out of you.

[cross-posted at Nashville Independent]

This afternoon, I randomly dropped Tall Hands’s untitled EP into my CD player. And started loving it immediately. They’ve got all the reverb of the Kicks and Walkmen but they play actual songs. The tangible kind. The kind of songs that you can hang onto. Even sing along with.

Imagine an American Supergrass (circa the self-titled album) and you’ll get the gist of Tall Hands — organic sounds, pretty melodies, and something a little anachronistic that you can’t place. Highly enjoyable.