God dammit. Chalk up another $6.50 and three hours of my life completely wasted. Fuck. To get a good idea of what Oliver Stone's new movie "Alexander" is all about, take a History Channel biography of Alexander the Great, a soap opera, and a gay porn and mix them all together. Then add a little bit of incestuous sexual tension and a few hundred names from another culture you can never remember and are unable to connect with a face until about an hour and a half into the movie. Then subtract all transitions and cohesional elements of the movie, and finally take some of the scenes that happened at the beginning and move them to an hour later and you get the idea of the kind of cinematic slop I had to sit through for three hours today.
This movie was so fucking gay. And I don't mean gay as in something you don't like, such as saying "It's gay that I have to work tonight" or "That new song by Good Charlotte is gay." I mean this movie was literally gay. Very fucking gay. This movie made the homoerotic tension in The Return of the King between Sam and Frodo look like completely normal male heterosexual interaction. There were several scenes where men kissed men on the lips, and one scene in which male exotic dancers rub up against each other, followed by Alexander making out with one of the dancers. To say that it was disturbing would make the movie sound far better than it actually was. The alternate ending of The Butterfly Effect which shows a fetus strangling itself was disturbing. This is something at the level above disturbing. Almost the entire movie, every time Alexander and his "best friend" (whose name I still couldn't tell you, it sounded different every time) talk, they look just a little too deeply into each other's eyes. They constantly look like they want to rip each other's clothes off and have butt sex. They're always undressing each other with their eyes. And they say they love each other and how they couldn't go on without the other about a hundred times throughout the movie. And when Alexander enters the conquered palace at Babylon, he and his men find the room where the deposed king kept all his concubines. All of a sudden in the concubine room Alexander finds a man. No reason. There's just one dude in there who was apparently a concubine along with about three hundred women. So naturally Alexander wants Mr. Concubine's nuts and he decides to get him as his "personal assistant" and damn near every scene for the rest of the movie you see those two stare lustfully at each other from across the room.
As if that weren't bad enough, there was sexual tension between Alexander and his mom. Yeah. Now granted, if Angelina Jolie were my mom I just might have a hard time not checking her out, but it was a little difficult to accept those staring at each other like they wanted to make Alexander a new son/brother. And Angelina Jolie was a terrible choice to be Alexander's mother. Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrell, who played Alexander, are almost exactly the same age, yet she played his mother in this movie. And they did a better job aging him than they did her. The only thing they did to make Angelina Jolie look any older was put a couple gray streaks in her hair. Now granted, women in those times gave birth earlier than they do today. But let's just pretend for argument's sake that she gave birth to Alexander at fifteen. She should still look fifteen years older than him. Jolie is 29. The problem is, when Alexander was a baby in the movie, Jolie looked her current age, 29. Yet when Alexander died at 32, they showed Jolie again and she looked like a 35 year old with a couple gray streaks in her hair. So she went from looking 29 years older than him at his birth to looking three years older than him at his death. Unless she just ages really well. If she was 29 when Alexander was born, that would have made her 61 when he died. I'm sorry, but she looked just a little too hot to be 61. If she was actually supposed to be 61, then that's the first time a 61-year-old has ever given me a boner.
Then one other thing that was stupid and pissed me off was the scene right after Alexander decides to make a barbarian woman his first wife. She goes to him after the wedding and finds him talking to his butt buddy. Now, even though they are clearly gay, this scene actually did not make them look gay at all. He looked like a heterosexual friend wishing his best friend luck in with the married life. They weren't kissing or saying I love you or checking each other out or anything. Well, Alexander's new wife gets so pissed that she storms upstairs. Apparently this barbarian woman who wasn't even royalty in the clan she came from thought she had the right to get pissed at the most powerful man in the world for talking to his friend. So then she calls him a homo (or something like that, I was really losing interest at this point) so he rips her clothes off and starts to rape her. Then he stops and pulls a scroll out of a bag and starts reading from it. Then his new barbarian wife picks up a knife that fell out with a scroll and puts it up to his throat and says she's about to kill him. Then he says "Go ahead", so naturally she doesn't but gives him the knife and they start fucking. Now, excuse me, but why is it in every movie the captive woman catches the captor with his guard down and gets a knife or a gun and a chance to kill them, but they never do? They always say something like "Now I'm going to kill you," to which the man always says something like "Go ahead and do it." Then the woman always pulls back the knife or a gun and finally sets it down and they start fucking. I think I'll try this trick in real life. I'll kidnap some chick, and then leave a knife within her reach. When she puts it up to my throat I'll tell her to kill me and then she'll drop the knife and we'll do it long into the night.
And another thing that pisses me off about Oliver Stone in general. He always picks movies and topics that he knows damn well are controversial and then always acts surprised when they cause controversy. Like right now he's probably reading a review of Alexander somewhere and saying "What's wrong with the relationship between Alexander and his friend? I can't believe forcing people to watch homoerotic sexual tension for three hours would piss people off." If you want to make a homoerotic movie, fine, but warn people. If I had seen Alexander staring lustfully at his male friend, male servant, or even his mother, I would have saved my money and my time. Fuck Oliver Stone and his God damn homoerotic shit of a movie.
people would have rather just watched Angelina Jolie look hot for three hours