Alexander The Fabulous

That’s what it sounds like Oliver Stone should have named his latest cinematic atrocity.

Stone gives himself much credit of “telling the truth” about Alexander’s bisexuality as if it’s some progressive badge of honor, but at the same time he can’t get away from the cruelest, least imaginative stereotyping: His Alexander, as expressed through the weepy histrionics of Colin Farrell, is more like a desperate housewife than a soldier. He’s always crying, his voice trembles, his eyes fill with tears.

Actually, he sounds like an early version of Bill Clinton. If he got the lip-biting thing down, he’d be ready to run for “Alexander The President.”

The movie apparently tells us a lot more about Oliver Stone than about Alexander:

The movie lacks any convincing ideas about Alexander. Stone advances but one, the notion that Alexander was an early multiculturalist, who wanted to “unify” the globe. He seems not to recognize this as a standard agitprop of the totalitarian mind-set, always repulsive, but more so here in a movie that glosses over the boy-king’s frequent massacres. Conquerors always want “unity,” Stalin a unity of Russia without kulaks, Hitler a Europe without Jews, Mao a China without deviationists and wreckers. All of these boys loved to wax lyrical about unity while they were breaking human eggs in the millions, and so it was with Alexander, who wanted world unity without Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Turks and Indians.

Read the whole thing. It’s Mark Steynian.