“Alexander” er flot og storstilet som den slags film nu bør være, men den savner alligevel bid og kraft, især hvad angår den redundante fortælling og de rodede personbeskrivelser. Nogen ny “Gladiator” er den ikke, men spektakulær, det er den i hvert fald.

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#61 caks 20 år siden

'I have let Alexander down'
January 15, 2005

Oliver Stone's new film Alexander has been panned by the critics. Normally a pugnacious defender of his work, the acclaimed director admits he got it wrong, writes Olga Craig.

There is no need to subject Oliver Stone to a painful precis of the more cruel comments of the cinema critics: he can, and does, recite them verbatim. Crouched forward, coffee cup in hand, he closes his eyes as he repeats in an anguished voice: "Puerile writing . . . confused plotting . . . limp acting . . . weak script . . . shockingly off-note performances . . . disjointed narrative . . . acted at a laughably hysterical pitch . . . it has wonderful highlights, but most of them are in Colin Farrell's hair . . ."

As he utters each phrase, his voice grows louder, his expression more anguished. There can be no denying that the tirade of vitriol from America's film reviewers has been relentless.

And Stone, film director and author of the latest swords-and-sandals epic Alexander has been, by his own admission, "destroyed" by their derision.

As he sits hunched in an easy chair in his Los Angeles office, he makes no attempt to conceal his dejection. "Alexander was a winner . . . pity the film wasn't," he says sadly.
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He grimaces. "Alexander never lost a battle in his life. And I have let him down. He was a fighter, the sort of man who would have gone after Osama bin Laden and never given up.

"But I didn't see this coming, this utter trashing of the movie. I should have. I got bloody battered for acknowledging Alexander's bisexuality. That hug between him and his lover, Hephaestion - it wasn't even a kiss, for f---'s sake - got slated. The gays lambasted me for not making Alexander openly homosexual, and in the Bible Belt, pastors were up in the pulpit saying that to watch this film was to be tempted by Satan."

Stone shakes his head: "The criticism has been ball-breaking. I was devastated, Colin Farrell was devastated. The audiences, they didn't know the story and they were confused by it. I did that wrong. That was my fault."

I open my mouth to speak but Stone throws up his hands, flashes that wide, gap-toothed smile and changes tack instantly. "I'd like to make it all over again. Right from the start, make the whole f---ing thing again."

I open my mouth again. "Joke, joke," he says, holding up one hand. "I don't mean I regret how I made the film and that's why I want to make it over again. I just mean I would love to make it all again - for the sheer fun of it. Because it was fun, you know. Hard f---ing graft, exhausting graft. But so much fun."

It's hard to believe that Stone is really talking in jest. For, at 57, the acclaimed director is clearly in the throes of obsession. He may be the winner of three Oscars and a British Academy Award but today he huddles in his seat with the mien of a man who has witnessed the public disembowelment of a cherished child.

Stone's films have often been attacked. Always controversial, he was pilloried for portraying former US president Richard Nixon as a foul-mouthed drunk and for glorifying serial murders in Natural Born Killers. The third film in his Vietnam trilogy, Heaven and Earth, was described by critics as "gruelling to watch" and "unbelievably fatuous". I am open-mouthed because Stone has always been gung-ho when it comes to defending his creations. Now, for what must be the first time, he is admitting that in many respects, "It is my fault". This is a much-humbled Oliver Stone.

His devastation is understandable: Alexander, the story of the warrior king who, by the age of 25, ruled an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas, was to be the pinnacle of his illustrious career, the culmination of a 15-year dream. The portrayal of Alexander is vintage Stone; rather than the glorious hero, he comes across as a somewhat weak leader, riven by doubts and guilt.

Though he was never defeated in battle, Alexander died just before his 33rd birthday. Many claim he was poisoned by his own soldiers, conquered, it would seem, by his arrogant intent for more glory.

Alexander's downfall is a lesson not lost on Stone. "Of course I will go on," he says, his tone pragmatic. "I make movies, that is what I do."

The lesson, however, has been brutal. "I don't think I will be able to pull this off again, not again," he says, his head lowering. "It was a huge feat, a big achievement. All movie directors have one big epic in them. This was my big epic."

Alexander has not just flopped artistically, but financially too. When it opened in the US in November, it grossed $US24.6 million in its first five crucial days. In Hollywood this is peanuts for a film that cost $US150 million to make. While Farrell was savaged for his overly sensitive portrayal of Alexander, even Sir Anthony Hopkins, the doyen of celluloid, was ridiculed for his portrayal of King Ptolemy more as a "deadbeat classics teacher than the narrator of an epic tale". Stone's hope is that "the European market will salvage Alexander. I can't give up on it, not now. I have to stick with it."

Stone's films ooze big emotion, big pumped-up action. As does the man. He is tall, with a haunted look, and his deep brown eyes blink constantly, giving him an anxious air. His voice is euphonious, not always in kilter with his words.

He is 20 minutes late for our interview but, when he arrives, it is as though a whirlwind has blasted through the calm of his outer office. He flings himself through the door all outstretched arms and swinging satchels - one over each shoulder.

"Sorry, sorry," he says, the bags falling in a muddle around his feet. "It's like Wacky Races in the car park. Come in, come in. Where d'ya want to sit?"

We settle into deep comfy seats, side by side. We don't stay there long, though. At least Stone doesn't. By the time I leave, 90 minutes later, he has changed seats three times; opened the blinds then closed them, leaving us in near-darkness; opened the french windows twice and closed them twice; turned the air-conditioning up, then down, then up again; called for coffee, opted instead for water, then switched to coffee. Stone does everything at maximum speed.

It has been 25 years since Stone's first Best Screenplay Oscar, for Midnight Express. He had been brought up in a conservative, God-fearing household and, after dropping out of Yale, at a time when thousands of young Americans were dodging the draft, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He won a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart but lost his jingoism en route. He might have disappeared from view had he not enrolled at the New York University film school, where Martin Scorsese became his mentor. Though Midnight Express won him his first accolade, it was his Vietnam films, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July - both depicting the horror and futility of war - that earned him world acclaim.

"It would have been impossible not to bring many of my own war experiences to the films," he acknowledges. "When I enlisted I was ready to die. It was the speech I wrote for Charlie Sheen in Platoon. I wanted to get to the bottom of the barrel. I felt I couldn't be an honest human being until I knew what war and killing were."

And Stone the soldier wanted to kill. "Yes I did, if I could," he says. He was wounded twice - the second time was enough to have him shipped home. "Someone next to me tripped a satchel charge. I could have hit the deck and been safe but something was telling me to just try to get hit. And I did, in the ass and the legs. That hit meant I missed the Tet offensive, thank God."

As Stone's acclaim as a film director and scriptwriter grew, so too did his reputation as a hellraiser and womaniser. "Yep, I raised some hell," is all he will say. Yet always he brought his own life to the screen.

In Alexander, the young king is torn between his love and respect for King Phillip II, his warrior father, and Olympias, his adoring but manipulative mother. "A lot of the interaction among the three of them came from childhood memories," he concedes.

His family was wealthy - his father was a stockbroker - and Stone attended boarding school. Then, one day, the young Oliver was called into the headmaster's office to be informed that his father was virtually bankrupt and that his parents were divorcing.

"It was painful, and it hurt, to be told like that," he tells me. "I can't blame my parents, but I was the vulnerable child. You need to hear that from your parents. But I was a product of the era in which I was born. Then, if you were middle-class, your children were shipped off to boarding school and somehow it became a buffer. All news, good or bad, was relayed through that third party."

Stone has three children from three marriages. Did he tell his children from his first and second marriages that he and their mothers were parting? "Yes, I did," he says. "But things are a little easier these days. "

Suddenly, Stone is back on the subject that he seems unable to escape from - Alexander.

As we gossip about the actors - Farrell and his co-star Angelina Jolie, who plays Alexander's mother - he confides they became close. "If they are not a couple, they should be," he says. "And Angelina with the snakes - couldn't keep her away from them. Not an iota of fear. That girl has guts."

- Telegraph
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#62 filmz-saxo 20 år siden

... Skal se filmen i aften, glæder mig på trods af de meget blandede anmeldelser...

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#63 Patriarch 20 år siden

Tak Caks... damn jeg ville ønske han var mere detaljeret omkring hvor han selv synes han havde fejlede (udover selvfælgelig valg af komponist ;-p)...
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
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#64 chandler75 20 år siden

# 60 Sorry, jeg gik ind via Movie City News, og der røg den lige igennem - også selvom jeg ikke er oprettet.
"Some people have bad taste and others have taste more like mine." - Roger Ebert

#65 19 år siden

Det er en af de mest rodede film jeg længe har set. Hvad er meningen med de spring, der foretages tilbage i tid? Fint nok, hvis de havde tjent et formål, men det er ikke tilfældet, de er komplet meningsløse. Det er altså ikke 'Memento 2', du laver, Mr. Stone. Samtidig indeholder filmen spring FREM i tid, der er decideret forvirrende, fx.:
I det ene øjeblik slår faderen hånden af Alexander, og i næste øjeblik ser man Alexander sidde på en hest klar til et slag (et slag der i øvrigt ikke er nogen optakt til), og en af hans hærførere siger: "Det var godt du blev gode venner med din far inden han døde".
Spørgsmålstegn, må jeg sige. Det værste er dog, at filmen er decideret kedelig - så hjælper effekter og store armbevægelser ingen steder. Det bedste moment i filmen er den måde, som kameraet panorerer fra den ene flanke til den anden i det (ene) gode slag midt i filmen. 2/6 stjerner kan de blive til, i betragtning af, at det skulle være en såkaldt 'storfilm'. Mere kan vel ej heller forlanges af en film, som instruktøren selv har indrømmet er en semi-stinker.

#66 19 år siden

#11: Selvom dit indlæg er noget forvirrende, så kan jeg tilslutte mig sammenligningen med Pearl Harbor, begge er nemlig såkaldte 'storfilm', der stinker (kongen i den diciplin er dog superstinkeren Titanic).

#67 19 år siden

#42 PredatorX: Super grineren indlæg. Jeg er helt enig.
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#68 filmz-1337 19 år siden

En meget skuffende film må jeg desværre sige. De bruger en masse tid på at bygge en person op som man senere skulle kunne se som en helt. Det virker bare ikke for dem.

Braveheart var en top film..
Gladiator var en top film..
Troja var en top film..

Alexander er en dårlig cocktail af dem som slet ikke fanger!
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#69 filmz-Bruce 19 år siden

Så kunne jeg ikke undsige mig længere. Under en hyggelig aften hos naboen og lidt Irish Coffee, kom Alexander pludselig på bordet og inden jeg vidste af det, var filmen på. Jeg håbede det bedste.

Bla bla bla.

Var faktisk positivt overrasket over starten, som fokuserede på Alexanders opvækst, indtil man pludselig blev revet brat ud af det hele og var i krig mod Perserne. Det bedste ved krigsscenerne var de storslåede scenerier over slagmarken.

Fuldstændig ligeglad med de bisexuelle scener, filmen er et makværk. Anthony Hopkins kunne ikke frembringe nogen følelse af storhed i hans monolog om Alexanders liv, men var dog et kærkomment intermission indslag, så man kunne få ladet vandet undervejs. Colin Farrel var alt andet end storslået som Alexander, men dog et bedre valg end Baz Luhrmans Alexander version, som havde truet med Di Caprio.

$150 mill. ligegyldighed.

Faneme godt Ben Hur er kommet!
Wishlist hos Axelmusic: http://www.axelmusic.com/wishlist.php?uid=11140
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#70 filmz-Is 17 år siden

Jeg kan huske at jeg så denne film præmiere dag.. Det var noget af det mest skuffende jeg havde set..
SE IKKE DENNE FILM.....

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