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Alexander: the great?

Alexander was arguabally the greatest military leader in recorded history. His story has become legend over the many years after his death. He created an army of Macedonians and Greeks that conquered the known world.

Now, on the heels of the epic Troy (2004, Wolfgang Peterson, available on DVD January 4, 2005), we have another posslby great epic. This film is based on the life of Alexander the great (played be Colin Farrell), and chronicles his life from childhood until the age of 32. Supporting Farrell is Anthony Hopkins as Old Ptolemy, Angelina Jolie as Olympias (Alexander's mother), and Val Kilmer as Philip (Alexander's father).

This is a GREAT risk for director/writer Oliver Stone, who already has a reputation for mucking up really interesting stories with his personal political views (see JFK). We are also in danger of seeing a lot of blood, and a lot of dialogue, but little plot.

I say that it's worth a try. Despite the fact that Angelina Jolie (29 years old) can play Colin Farrell(28 years old)'s mother, and the possibility of a bloodbath, this might actually be a really good movie. Besides, it's either this or Christmas with the Kranks.

Alexander opens Wednesday, November 24th nationwide in the US.

What do YOU think?

There's an interesting twist to this story....

Alexander May Go To Court
Lifestyle: 23 November 2004, Tuesday.

A group of Greek lawyers has threatened to file a lawsuit against Warner Bros. and Oliver Stone "for suggesting Alexander the Great was bisexual" in their latest blockbuster.

Athens-based attorneys are demanding that Warner Bros. issue a disclaimer saying "Alexander" is a fiction. They claim that the unreleased version of the film made references to Alexander the Great's alleged homosexuality, "a fact that is in no historical document or archive on Alexander".

In "Alexander," director Oliver Stone and actor Colin Farrell take on the legendary warrior who conquered most of the known world by age 25.

By the time he died, just shy of his 33rd birthday, Alexander's empire spanned what now is Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; two million square miles.

All that happened in his short life, which spanned his birth in Pella, Macedonia (now Greece), in 356 BC and ended abruptly in 323 BC during a drinking bout in Babylon, now Iraq.
------------------------
Makes for an interesting twist to the story of Alexander the Great.... Was he or wasn't he? :D

That's so stupid. Greeks liked the mansecks, and if some stuffy-ass lawyer disagrees, then maybe he needs a lesson in the history of his country.

oliveer stone is great at putting great figures in odd sexual situations. Of course, I suppose Alexander could have ben bi. Who knows? Who cares? I don't think that his sexuality has any bearing on his greatness. It didn't win any battles, that's for sure.

I heard Alexander was bi way before oliver stone began directing this movie. I don't know the truth but historians have believed that for YEARS.

This movie is probably gonna be a dissappointment for me. Especially with the cast.

Asta!!

Homosexuality was actually considered normal (more or less) in both ancient Greece and Rome. At least during your youth.

This has got to be the most stupid story I've ever read.

I have the utmost respect for ancient Greek culture, but ever since that ridiculous fake crash during the Olympics and now this nonesense, I'm having difficulty in not dismissing the current Greeks as a group of whiners and dodgers... :)

Mr Mephisto

Werent they wrestling naked in Greece during that time....its not that far fetched to believe he could be bi-sexual if they were already playing with each other and their goods were already touching

Anyone seeing the title "Alexander" without having read a precis of the film is probably expecting a decent historical movie similar to Spartacus or even Gladiator, not a gay romance interspersed with a few battles.

I've heard lots of predictions that this is gonna flop. I'll still see it though, I love these epic war movies.

To be perfectly honest, Colin Farrell looks like an idiot with blond hair. :D

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:

Quote:

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.

Yowsa!

Here's the full review:

Quote:

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.

Mty review:
If you see thie movie, turn around and run as fast as you can. I just came back from this, and I wish I had just come back from eating back hair instead. This movie featured the worst acting, writing, directing, battle choreographing, music, and diologue in the history of mankind. That was no exaggeration, BTW. Colin Farrell has now proven that he is not an actor, and has just destroyed any acting credibility he may or may not have gotten from movies like the Recruit. With or without the gay thing, this was the worst piece of cinima ever to befoul a screen. I cannot overstate the awefulness of this film. I beg you not to put yourself through three long hours of it. I don't even think MST3K would tough this garbage. I would like to personally kill Oliver Stone, but I know after I did it, he'd make a movie about how I was gay. May he rot in hell.

Im torn--I love historical epics, but this one has been thrashed in every review Ive seen. I probably wont see it--it has a 16% on rottentomatoes.com, probably the lowest composite review score Ive ever seen.

^^^^ Actually I've seen zero on a number of films. But like I said..I could tell this was gonna be crap with the cast. Kilmer prolly woulda made a better Alexander.

Asta!!

Comic Book Guy: Worst Movie Ever!

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Mty review:
Colin Farrell has now proven that he is not an actor, and has just destroyed any acting credibility he may or may not have gotten from movies like the Recruit.

Did you ever see him in Tigerland?

An actor is only as good as the material with which he's presented.

Mr Mephisto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Mephisto

An actor is only as good as the material with which he's presented.

Mr Mephisto

Bullshit. Christpher walken is a god in whatever role he plays. He is always good.

Back to the movie. I knew nothing and had heard nothing of the gay/bi undertones and the like. Simple fact, this movie is a horrid excuse for cinema. Do NOT see this movie.

Unfortunately I could tell I wouldn't like the movie the minute reciews started coming out that showed the acting. I haven't seen it yet, but Colin looks like a tool with blonde hair and, as much as I like Angelina Jolie, her ... "accent" ... in the movie is absolutely horrendous. Talk about terrible casting. And then, once you get past that, the acting in the previews is terrible, and I can't help but assume it to be indicative of the rest of the movie.

I'll most likely not be seeing this movie in a theatre, and who knows about rentals.

Dammit! Why do things like this need to be fucked up? The gay thing I don't mind because it is a fact that male beauty was far more admired than female beauty, and that Alexander was bisexual. But argh, don't make that the focal point of the movie for cryin out loud. Maybe focus on how Alexander effectively managed to kill more Greeks than any opponent in history. Or perhaps the battles and his genius and ingenuity of using his small force to his advantage time and time again... But no, we have to be obsessed with why he was gay. Anyone wanna back me or join me in making a movie about Alexander that isn't utter crap?

Quote:

Originally Posted by archer2371

Dammit! Why do things like this need to be fucked up?

/snip

Anyone wanna back me or join me in making a movie about Alexander that isn't utter crap?

Oliie hoped to draw in trendy-touchy-feely-arsty-fartsy-metrosexual crowd. He's an ass.

I fully agree. If it's a gay love story, fine. But marketing it as an epic of alexandar's conquest of the known world was false advertising.

[/QUOTE]Mty review:
If you see thie movie, turn around and run as fast as you can. I just came back from this, and I wish I had just come back from eating back hair instead. This movie featured the worst acting, writing, directing, battle choreographing, music, and diologue in the history of mankind. That was no exaggeration, BTW. Colin Farrell has now proven that he is not an actor, and has just destroyed any acting credibility he may or may not have gotten from movies like the Recruit. With or without the gay thing, this was the worst piece of cinima ever to befoul a screen. I cannot overstate the awefulness of this film. I beg you not to put yourself through three long hours of it. I don't even think MST3K would tough this garbage. I would like to personally kill Oliver Stone, but I know after I did it, he'd make a movie about how I was gay. May he rot in hell.
[QUOTE]
LOL @ that review...gave me quite a chuckle. I love historical epics, but from the reviews, I don't know that I'll go see it.

basically, read the reviews, go to rottentomatoes, and dont doubt either source (providing youre seeing a negative opinion). ive seen worse movies, but most of them had the common decency to stay below 3 hours in length

Movie sucks ass. DO NOT GO.

Well, I went and saw this last night since I wasn't going to spend my WHOLE weekend doing homework. Managed to stay awake for the 3+ hours. There weren't captions for the show, so I didn't catch all the dialogue, but I don't feel like I really missed anything. There was TONS of sappy eye batting by everybody. Ugh. And EVERY time a scene was changing, there was a pan up to the sky and a white out. Virtually no coherent, fluid timeline of events. If I don't see this again in my life, I'll be happy.

Holy shit this was a bad, bad, bad, movie. I just can't stress how bad it was.

I have to go with the consenses....TERRIBLE not to mention your butt being numb.

i thought it was good but not great. It touches on a lot of things at the same time: mother/son and father/son complexes.

angelina jolie looked so beautiful the WHOLE time. Imo, she was reason enough to watch the movie.

Being of greek decent myself and contrary to what many pro reviewers have said, I thought she did a great job with the accent.

The movie DOES suck, I walked out of the theater about 45 minutes into it, the dialogue and acting was so bad.

Just got back from seeing it and I wanted to walk out but a few factors stopped me, A) I didn't drive but came with a couple of friends; B) I paid to much to see it so I was going to watch it no matter how much my eyes bled.

Edit: I must agree Jolie is beautiful as always, however, she does not justify reason enough to see this movie.

Saw it this past weekend. simply a bad movie.

I couldn't feel anything for any character at all. The movie made alexander look like he's just some nomad with an army, running around and taking over nations. There purpose behind his actions was never really brought out in the movie. I thought the A&E documentary on him was much more entertaining than the movie was.

I really feel sorry for my wife, who loves mythology and was really looking forward to this movie. =|

I hate to say it (no, I don't), but I'm glad that this movie bombed over the weekend. Maybe Hollywood will learn that big budgets and big name-casting do not necessarily make a box-office smash, and will concentrate on higher quality, lower-budget films.

Ehh, who am I kidding.

I saw it Saturday night TG weekend. Quite frankly, the movie was bad. Bad bad bad.

It was boring and long. Granted, I'm not complaining about length, because I really enjoyed Braveheart which was also 3 hours long. But, if Alexander in the movie wasn't warring, he was whining.

This is not a movie I will buy.

Although, Angelina Jolie looked absolutely GORGEOUS in this movie.