Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 02, 2004 at 13:47:41

Leaders and Followers

By Duncan Shepherd
December 2, 2004

Movies reviewed this week: Alexander, Christmas with the Kranks, Closer, Kinsey and National Treasure

Alexander

The big push is on, clear through Christmas to the Oscar nominations, and not a moment to draw a breath. Huff-puff....

Alexander. The Great, that is. Not great movie, mind you, just great Alexander. The movie, on the other hand, is a lumbering three-hour uncinematic spectacle that traces the Macedonian conqueror (or uniter, depending upon your politics) from his days as a young lad to the end of his days as a young man -- or more concretely, from a child actor who's a pretty fair look-alike, and even Irish-accented sound-alike, for the star of the show, a bleached-blond Colin Farrell -- while his mother, Angelina Jolie, rolling her r's in some vague Mediterranean tongue, doesn't age a day. Oliver Stone, in quest of another exposé, exposes himself as pretty much a fraud of a filmmaker. Oh, he may shower the hero with rose petals upon his triumphant entry into a computer-generated Babylon, and he may scare up a harem of wriggling and shimmying concubines, and he may marshal some trick photography for the battle scenes: time-tested slow-motion, of course, but also the more modish (post-Private Ryan) sorts of jerky and jumpy motion, and a totally bloodshot screen when the hero takes a spear in the chest. Most of the movie, though, is rudimentary face shots, in talky, speechy, shouty, bellowy scenes that are virtually unstaged, and are not more powerful for the rising volume of the voices. To a human battering ram such as Stone, the liberty to depict the switch-hitting sexual mores of the Ancient Greeks (Jared Leto in eyeliner) might have seemed a worthwhile advance over the mid-Fifties handling of the material (Richard Burton in the hero's sandals), but this smidge of historical pedantry, no less than the general tedium, seems unlikely to rally the moviegoing troops. (Box-office receipts over the opening weekend wound up in sixth place; and the word-of-mouth, on any aspect apart from Rosario Dawson's bosoms, is bound to hurt.) Only the background music of Vangelis, for an authentic Greek flavor, gives the viewer the intermittent illusion that he is watching an epic: clearly the better option than Yanni.

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