Burton’s voice alone is likely an improvement. Wot an actor, he.
i would have rather seen colin farrel getting down angelina jolie. i know i’d like to (get down on angelina jolie, not colin farrel)
Chance to respond, account works at last. Alexander is an ambitious film… because the individual in question is a hugely influential figure and his story is complex and controversial. You may doubt his bisexuality but you’ll have to go toe to toe with Oxbridge professors about that. Interesting to note those Greek lawyers shelved their legal action.
Alexander is ahead of its time…aesthetically I’ve never seen anything cinematically quite like it and I’ve seen a LOT of films. It plays like a dream, somewhere between myth and reality. I applaud any attempt to return to the good old days of Godfather II, Chinatown and the amazing Apocalypse Now when big budget films carried intelligence and creativity. Colin Farrell was particularly outstanding in the lead role, of all the characters here, totally believable. Compare the content of this film to any others from Hollywood over the past few years; Alexander wins, hands down.
The ‘old Richard Burton film Alexander the Great’ was a piece of crap, like watching Pres Chen open his worthless gob.
Where are you going America? I love Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski. Fuck you forever Bush, you mean, shallow, narrow minded cunt.
No we don’t. We simply have to point out that there’s no primary source material to indicate anything of the sort, and that the entire case is based on a handful of dubious secondary (or even tertiary), sources which are embellished and overinterpreted.
I think you’ll find most professors are far more cautious about this issue than the media paints them.
Yes, I also find Irishmen completely indistinguishable from Macedonians. Fantastic role casting there, no doubt. Incredibly believable.
I don’t doubt it. In fact, I seem to have always known this about Alexander (from school? Doubt it, American school). I must have picked this up in reading about Alexander or the times or both, somewhere. (I didn’t even know this was controversial, in fact)
Ok, now you did it. I’ll have to check it out now.
Burton was a better actor than many of his films deserved, imo. By the way, I like Farrell. Not having seen the movie (!) he does seem, to me, to be too small somehow to pull it off. But hey, I’ll check it out and see for myself.
Follow the dollars, that’s where America’s always going. What I mean is, Hollywood’s biggest dream is - apparently - to minimize risk. Movies that seem formulaic are merely touchstones on the way, although it doesn’t seem to help much that society’s dynamism is accelerating (today’s ‘formula’ doesn’t work tomorrow, so we get to start all over again; e.g., the advent of CGI and its effect on moviemaking).
I think this is a big reason why today’s movies seem to leave so much of their budgets off the screen (which is another way of agreeing, I think, with your comment “I applaud any attempt to return to the good old days of Godfather II, Chinatown and the amazing Apocalypse Now when big budget films carried intelligence and creativity.”) The problem isn’t that Hollywood is making low-budget fare, it’s just that too much of the intelligence and creativity goes into figuring out ways to reduce financial risk rather than make the movies themselves better (e.g., by using CGI to create the human scale necessary in telling a story like Alexander instead of some more effective, literary or human device).
In some ways, it seems to me, Hollywood is trying to tell stories today (Troy, Alexander, LOTR, on and on) that were’t ‘doable’ even ten years ago because Hollywood has substituted FX/CGI for the literary devices you and I crave in our fiction. One of the problems with Alexander seems to be that even Stone thinks human sexuality can be a kind of complement to these CGI effects, that he’s forgotten it’s the art of storytelling that makes memorable movies, not X plus Y less Z yields B(ucks).
Hollywood, eschewing risk, has been reduced to sequels and movies like Alexander (ones that seem to assume that CGI is The Formula that will somehow always turn Big Stories into Big Profits). If I’m right, then I’m not describing art.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply flike. Alexander is a long way from perfect but I appreciate even an attempt to create a big budget film which is both difficult and complex.
Ajax, who started the thread, dismissed the film as ‘pompous’ which I felt was inaccurate. I really felt Stone tried to bring these figures of ancient history to life by examining their motivations, beliefs and individual characters. Ok, so Ms. Jolie’s turn was a little OTT, but I don’t think the same could be said for Farrell who was portraying an extraordinarily driven and visionary figure. My main criticism would be with the film’s narrative which did seem disjointed at times; perhaps some of those literary devices you mention could have been employed here flike. Personally, I don’t think Stone overdid the SFX.
What a shame the grey men now have a vice like grip on the studios. Will there never be another Apocalypse Now, when money is burnt in the pursuit of artistic excellence? It still strikes me as strange that US critics reserve such vitriol for Alexander at a time when ‘Alien vs. Predator’ even manages to get made.
As you say flike, Follow the dollars, that’s where America’s always going.
For what it’s worth, I thought the movie was crap, but the issue of Al’s sex life was dealt with reasonably well.
Far better than in ‘Troy’… “I’m so stricken- you killed my …cousin, and nobody kills my …cousin and gets away with it.”
A quick reference:
pothos.org/alexander.asp?paraID=42
pothos.org - All about Alexander the Great
Another point- I took the ‘Irish’ accents of the Macedonians as pointing to them as outsiders who had adopted the culture of a superior neighbouring civilisation (no offence intended 
)
Don’t know if this was intentional.
This movie was in need of a disclaimer warning viewers against the dangers of deep vein thrombosis. As one reviewer said, no movie should be three hours long unless it has hobbits in it.
And the thing that troubled me about the gay scenes was not that they were “in your face”, but that they seemed forced as Colin is so obviously a homophobe. His scenes with guy love interests really unbelievable – and he’s supposed to be a great actor or something?
It would have been if they’d managed to get it right.
Would you like the entire film dubbed into Greek perhaps, or maybe it was a North American accent you were looking for?
Would you like the entire film dubbed into Greek perhaps, or maybe it was a North American accent you were looking for?[/quote]
Of course not. But I do think that it’s reasonable for actors to be cast who actually look something like the historicial figures they are supposed to represent. I also find it strange for someone to look at an Irishman and think that he’s very well cast as a Macedonian. It’s an odd way to categorise casting accuracy.
And no it was not at all a ‘North American accent’ I was looking for. If you’d read my post, you would have seen that I would have objected to that categorically. If anything, I would have preferred to have seen a Macedonian accent.
Yeah, imagine that: I think the pompous bit describes Oliver Stone to a T. Way overrated as a movie guy, imho.[/quote]
I just do not see how the you can say a depiction of the person who conquered his entire known world and then found more to conquer is an overacted move. AlexanDer wAs so unbelieVably over the top. He fought until he was wounded In INdia before turning baCk.
He was lIke, “Oh, I’m not invincible? Fancy that!”
I learned ancient history from a Harvard grad and, let me tell you, the movie matches the histroy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s what Alexander thought he was doing, not what Stone thought Alexander was doing. We are talking about a man whose mother told him he was the son of Zeus, for crying out loud. What was he going to do as a boy? Say, “Oh, mom! You’re so full of it!” No, he’s going to file it in his long-term memory and never forget it no matter what anyone tries to tell him.
I agree that the movie seems formulaic, but your analysis is painfully simplistic.
The narrator tells you right off the bat: AleXanDer is a myth as much as a man. Those closest to him knew only too well.
Furthermore, the movie seems formulaic because the protagonist was a formulaic thinker. He planned what he was going to do and strategized the entire way. 
He knew when to make a show of a farce (his father’s remarriage). He knew when to make a farce of a show (the Gordian knot).
It is true. Hollywood does have this formula that required a movie to be entertaining to its constituency (pre-teens and the entire world), but they usually refuse to compromise another level of sophistication. To wit, they craft movies in a multilayered fashion.
Could it be that you see the simple level of the movie because you are not looking deeply enough? It appears that you are trying to find Stone in the film and not Alexander, the Great. Find him. He’s there.
Why waste millions of dollars hashing over the same issue that was so well presented before?
十面埋伏
Stone can’t understand bad mythology plus bad movie equals bad box office. Nope, accoding to Stone it’s the small minded movie goers who are at fault.
The Guardian
[quote]At the UK premiere of his epic film of Alexander, Oliver Stone last night blamed “raging fundamentalism in morality” for the film’s US box office failure.
“Sexuality is a large issue in America right now, but it isn’t so much in other countries,” the Oscar-winning director explained yesterday. “There’s a raging fundamentalism in morality in the United States. From day one audiences didn’t show up. They didn’t even read the reviews in the [American] south because the media was using the words: ‘Alex is Gay’.”
Meanwhile, Colin Farrell, who plays the title role, helpfully added his own explanation for the biopic’s commercial failure: “The film is a draining experience to watch. It’s loaded with mythology, icons, symbolism and destiny. My friends have watched the film and said: ‘Jesus Christ it’s not exactly Gladiator’.”
The
Sounds like Oceans 11 & 12 minus any issues.
I liked the battle scenes – the Indian scenes with the elephants, in particular, were fascinating.
The movie’s biggest problem: the casting. Both Kilmer and Farrell were not right for their roles, and Jolie looked way too young.
As for the homosexual angle – Stone was too scared, I guess, to actually show what he wanted to. Alexander’s homosexual encounters amounted to soulful looks, whereas his one heterosexual encounter was pretty hot. Stone was willing to film Alex having sex with his wife, and he actually showed Dawson naked. Where was the equivalent hot sex scene with Leto, I’d like to know? On the cutting room floor? In a film that Stone keeps on saying is supposed to be a groundbreaking examination of Alexander’s bisexuality, this is hypocrisy.
My wife rented this DVD a couple of nights ago. Total crap. I want my two and a half hours back. :raspberry: