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All Possibility, Made Of Custard
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To be perfectly honest, Colin Farrell looks like an idiot with blond hair. 
I don't think this movie is going to do very well. I'm not interested in seeing movies like this or Troy. I feel that the story is trumped by the huge budgets and A-list cast. Why else would you cast ANGELINA JOLIE as his mother??? Give me a break.
I just went over to the New York Times to read their review...among all the ads for Alexander is a review that mentions, among other things:
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This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him. Certainly it's brought out the worst in terms of the puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas.
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Yowsa!
Here's the full review:
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November 24, 2004
MOVIE REVIEW | 'ALEXANDER'
With No More Parents to Conquer, He Wept
By MANOHLA DARGIS
There comes the moment in the career of many directors when they are compelled to tell the story of a great man in whose life they seem to see a glimmer of their own image. Francis Ford Coppola had Preston Tucker, the automotive innovator who tried and failed to challenge Detroit in much the same way as the filmmaker took on Hollywood, while Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson each had Jesus. Now Oliver Stone has Alexander the Great, the Macedonian tyrant who cut a bloody swath through the ancient world to no obvious end other than, if Mr. Stone's big, blowsy movie is to believed, get away from his kvetch of a mother.
And, what a kvetch she was! Mad of eye and teased of hair, Olympias, played with nose-flaring gusto by Angelina Jolie, was the mother of all monstrous mothers, a literal snake charmer whose love for her only son had the stench of incestuous passion and the tedium of the perpetual nag. For Alexander - Colin Farrell, upstaged by an epically bad dye job - the Oedipal plot would only thicken because he also loved Olympias's most loathed enemy, her husband and his father, Philip, the King of Macedon (Val Kilmer). The struggle between Olympias and Philip, these primordial warring female and male forces, would be reproduced in both Alexander's bisexual desires and his rapacious conquest of the feminized East. In other words, Alexander became his dad to waylay his mom.
The Greek historian Strabo wrote that "all the followers of Alexander preferred to accept the marvelous rather than the true." So it is with Mr. Stone, whose Alexander is a psychologically addled but fundamentally decent despot. In this take, his conquest Jones isn't meant to be an end in itself, a grab for power or untrammeled bloodlust, but a civilizing form of colonization.
Whether or not Alexander's desire to bring Hellenic culture to the so-called barbarians sprang from the heart or head is, of course, beside the point considering the trans-continental carnage; the Europeans who ravaged Mesoamerica were equally sincere. Whatever drove Alexander, it's disappointing that Mr. Stone, who in his previous films brilliantly captures the frenzied high of violence, is so intent on wiping the blood off his hero's face to show us the tears.
The inanity of Mr. Stone's script, written with Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis, works a similarly palliative effect, since it lays the gory bill for Alexander's plundering at Olympias's feet. From age 20, after he succeeds his father, Alexander spends his life running away from his mother.
As the young marauder kills and enslaves peoples from Egypt to India, Mr. Stone repeatedly returns us to Olympias, snakes coiling around her body and chastising her absent son in a bewildering accent, part Yiddishe Mama, part Natasha of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" fame: "You don't write, you don't call, why don't you settle down with a nice Macedonian girl?" or words to that effect. Rarely since Joan Crawford rampaged through the B-movie sunset of her career has a female performer achieved such camp distinction.
Mr. Stone has always made stories about men for whom ordinary life is impossible by accident or by choice. As a storyteller he has long made a habit out of extreme personalities, a preoccupation that during the 1990's was matched by one of the most playfully expressive visual styles in American mainstream movies.
The director's detractors have tended to concentrate on the controversial content of his films (American presidents and serial killers, among other subjects), dissecting and occasionally discounting his work because of the ways in which it deviated from its historical inspiration. But the truth of Mr. Stone's films has never been located in the White House or the Warren Commission's Report; it's in the richness of his imagery, the energy of his direction, the soulful intensity of his actors.
There are moments in "Alexander" that show Mr. Stone in fine form, including a battle scene shot from the view of a soaring bird and the aching tenderness between the ruler and his longtime lover, Hephaistion (Jared Leto, delivering the only credible performance in the film), but these grace notes are few and far between. This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him. Certainly it's brought out the worst in terms of the puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas.
Given that our historical moment is equally weighted between prurience and Puritanism it's no surprise that media interest in "Alexander" has focused more on the character's sexual exploits than his military campaigns. The ancient Greeks didn't share our 19th-century-derived conception of the homosexual, but they certainly engaged in homosexual sex, especially between men and boys. What made Alexander somewhat unusual wasn't his same-sex desire, but that he slept with men his own age.
To Mr. Stone's credit he doesn't shy away from the character's omnisexual appetites even if he doesn't allow Mr. Leto to cut loose like Rosario Dawson, who plays Alexander's wildcat wife, Roxane. Then again, in light of Alexander and Roxane's comical boudoir brawling and growling there's something to be said for directorial restraint.
Like Mary Renault's purple-prosy biographical portrait "The Nature of Alexander," Mr. Stone begins this story with the tyrant's death at 32. But because this is no ordinary death and no ordinary director, Mr. Stone opens his version with a self-conscious nod to "Citizen Kane." To compare Orson Welles's masterpiece seriously with "Alexander" would be unkind to Mr. Stone, who has made great films before and will, I hope, make them again. Yet it's worth noting that while "Citizen Kane" is an unflinching portrait of a monstrous man's will to power, "Alexander" soft-pedals a far more terrible monster. Welles took a merciless view toward his tyrant and was subjected to systematic retaliation by William Randolph Hearst, the real-life model for Kane. Creditors aside, the only one that Mr. Stone finally must answer to is himself.
"Alexander" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film features a lot of graphic warfare with impaled flesh, severed limbs and disturbing images of animal cruelty. Ms. Dawson also takes her top off, which may disturb some viewers in a rather different fashion.
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You have to laugh at yourself...because you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't. - Emily Saliers
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