Tuesday, January 18, 2005

MOVIES : Alexander

I'd heard this was shit, and it was. I specifically went to see the exact opposite of The Godfather, and because I didn't have to 'pay' because I have an unlimited card...
From the opening scene where Anthony Hopkins craps on about stuff, to the closing scene where he changes history to maintain the legend of Alexander, I was bored. No commitment to characters, no commitment to story telling (why did yo make the film Oliver?), no commitment to homosexual themes.
Just crap really.
Couple of examples. Alexander has a male lover (that his wife gets jealous of) but he always refuses to enter Alexander's chamber, and hardly ever kisses him! And yet Alexander's father obviously has a male lover and in a very important scene they kiss very strongly. And when Alexander is a child and being taught by a sophist, he is informed that Aristotle said that homosexual love was bad because it was only based in lust. Now I don't know what Aristotle said, but I do know that Plato, in the Symposium, said that homosexual love was the greatest love because it _wasn't_ based on animal lust, because it didn't create children (and was therefore about intellectual love rather than physical).
Alexander sometimes talks about his dream to unite the world and set its peoples free by bringin together all the different races in harmony. What a pile of crap. This was supposed to be his vision that was to great for his time, but it's really hard to believe that the real Alexander would say these things, and just as hard to believe when the actor hollowly intones them. What about the slaves, and the women? It just doesn't ring true - there is no reason Alexander would think this, there was no mentor for him to develop such a completely radical suggestion (in the movie anyway)
Bad boy Oliver Stone is all I can say. 3hours in a cinema and bored for nearly all of it.

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