Alexander the Not So Great

[emad]

Telegraph
By Hugh Davies
(Filed: 31/12/2004)

The Hollywood film director Oliver Stone said yesterday that the flop in America of his £83 million production about Alexander the Great was 'dismaying', confessing that more people watched it on the opening weekend in Croatia 'than in the entire' Deep South.

Mr Stone said: "I still think it's a beautiful movie, but Alexander deserves better than I gave him. There was clear resistance to his homosexuality. It became the headline to the movie.

"They called him Alexander the gay. That's horribly discriminatory, but the film simply didn't open in the Bible Belt."

He said that he should have cut it from three hours to two-and-a-half "and taken out the homosexuality for the US market and for countries sensitive to such things, like Korea or Greece".

He added: "Kids weren't comfortable with men who hugged, a king who cries and expresses tenderness."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/31/walex31.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/12/31/ixportal.html

[Not_Giving_Up]

1. Hugging, crying, tenderness

Gee, we don't want our kids to learn those things! Please, cut them from your movie!

[tjdee]

2. Sorry, that's bullshit. Philadelphia did well, so did the Birdcage, etc.

Don't blame the homosexuality/homophobia for your suck film!

Even if all the (very tame) homosexual elements were taken out, it still would have been a mediocre movie. But then it would have been a historically inaccurate mediocre movie.

Yes, he should have clipped down the time. He also shouldn't have allowed Rosario Dawson anywhere near it.

[Smarmie Doofus]

3. Screw the slave states. They'd rather watch cars racing...

around in circles. High culture for folks in them parts.


On a (slightly) more serious note, saw a review in Nat'l Review ( at the library... don't get panicky) of ALEXANDER that was interesting, in the sense of it's always interesting to see how the RW intelligentsia grapples w. the big H.

Something like watching the RC church dealing with it ... but the conflict plays out in more subtle ways. The church hierarchy screams hysterically about out gays while within the clergy itself , natural H seems perverted into rampant pedophilia.

The NR/Heritage Foundation types try to cope with H in their midst through arch, but simplistic and dishonest, dismissals of gay-positive scholarship, and in this case, gay-positive sentiment in pop-culture.

Read it if you can... you'll know what NOT to think.

[Benhurst]

4. The movie really was far too long, especially down here in Dixie

where it takes over 40 seconds for each nerve impulse to cross a synapse.