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If you live
in a big city, A
Very Long Engagement might be opening at a theatre near
you.
If
you don’t live in a big city, you can still see Christmas with the Kranks. You
could also take a cheese grater to bathing suit area, but we
don’t recommend that, either.
We also
don’t recommend Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
At least to anyone who doesn’t have three hours to
kill, as well as a desire to be bored to death-slash-watch the
frightening tragedy collectively called Val Kilmer’s Career.
Kilmer isn’t the star of Alexander,
but he’s in it enough to have some of the magical Wonderland/Spartan/Batman Forever/The Island of
Dr. Moreau stuff rub off on the final product. You can
smell it from where you are, can't you?
Instead, we
get Colin Farrell (A
Home at the End of the World) as The Star, namely, a
blonde bisexual who, coincidentally, shares the same name as
this awful film. He
has mommy issues (presumably because Angelina Jolie sounds like
Natasha Fatale), and like most of the women I’ve dated, he has
daddy issues, too. Then
Alexander starts conquering land like nobody’s business,
amassing an empire that rivaled even Wal-Mart by the time he was
32. Then he dies.
Of course, like any standard year-end biopic, the death
is shown at the beginning, with everything else following a
jumbled but fairly standard flashback timeline (except the
really disjointed death scene of Daddy Kilmer).
Aside from
some brutal (but, sadly, in short supply) battle scenes, which
are perhaps the most inventive since Braveheart
and the only thing remotely reminiscent of Stone’s previous
work, Alexander represents everything that’s wrong with the big, bloated
Hollywood pseudo-epic. Too
much with the lavish and not enough connecting with viewers,
just like fellow DOA members The
Alamo and Troy, which all look like the exact same gay masquerade party to me
(only in this case, it really is
a gay masquerade party – red states beware!).
I
honestly tuned out less than 15 minutes into Alexander, thanks to an extraordinarily lengthy opening credits
sequence (which doesn’t actually involve any, you know,
opening credits) and the excruciatingly dull narration from
Anthony Hopkins. It
gave me major high school flashbacks, hurtling me back in time,
into history classes which required careful attention to shapely
female classmates in order to stay conscious (as nice as Rosario
Dawson’s full frontal scene was, it wasn’t enough of a
distraction for a three hour lesson).
Now if I can just make it back to my locker without
having my books knocked out of my hands, I’ll be okay.
Next
week: Closer, The House of Flying Daggers, and
some more surprises.
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