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ALEXANDER

Directed by Oliver Stone

Distributed by Warner Bros., 2005

Starring Colin Farrell, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto and Angelina Jolie

It took me twice watching it to realize that it was more than a big-budget blow-up that claims to pass as an epic but barely rides out of the muck.

If there's anything I've learned here, it's that you can't trust Hollywood to get its fact blissfully married to its fiction. It's like Alexander and Roxane--hissing cats on the wedding bed. One moment they're all naked and in flagrante delicto, the next he avoids her like the plague.

The first time I watched it, I barely could stomach all the 'facts'. I couldn't really appreciate the whirlwind journey, with all those names and places. (I am a sort-of history buff, and watching the film drove me insane.) I spent half the time thinking Hopkins' narrator mode is ill-timed, and the other half squirming in my seat at all the loose ends and important parts of his biography and campaign that they'd mishandled or ignored.

The second time around, I was just relieved that it wasn't as unnecessarily bloated like mish-mash Troy.

One thing I'll give it, though. More than its wars, I appreciated its attempt at bringing bisexuality to "casual fact" level in the movie. There was no doubt that the guy was swinging that way. But then, in his attempt to get Alexander's sexuality down to a pat, it seemed that Stone was acting too hasty and was more sensitive to the stigma than he would have liked to claim. In the end, neither the heterosexual nor the homosexual side of the man was really given a good look into.

This review is also found in Yahoo! Movies.

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