THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN 11AM AND 3PM

The film Alexander has just entered its second agonising hour...
Me: "God, this film is awful."
Richard: "It's not. It's just not. There's plenty."
Me: "I think I see where they're going with this."
Richard: "What?"
Me: "Jared Leto is in love with Alexander, and he's looking at him marrying his new wife. So, here's what's gonna happen..."
Richard: "What's gonna happen?"
Me: "Alexander is going to find his wife with her neck slit open in bed, and written in blood on the wall above will be 'MEET ME AT THE MOUNTAIN TOP, so Alexander will have to fight Jared Leto on the mountain where they trained as kids. There will be…

A suitably rousing epic that compels despite its issues with script and production, Oliver Stone's "Alexander" provides a full-bodied cinematic experience. Sweeping and, on occasion, stirring, Stone's film appeals as a solid observation of the deeds of a larger-than-life conqueror.

Beginning three centuries before the so-called common era, "Alexander" tells the story of the Macedonian King who led his armies through Asia, piecing together an empire for the ages. The film splits its narrative focus between the youth of Alexander and his conquest of the much of the known world.

Starring Colin Farrell as Alexander, Stone is never able to get under the King's skin. Though the film attempts to pay attention to Alexander's bed-hopping internal turmoil, the audience is…

The further back into history you delve, the more mythical some figures become. Stories about legends handed down through the ages that get embellished until the waters about what is truth and what is fiction get murkier and murkier.
Alexander The Great was a military leader and King Of Macedonia who conquered large parts of Asia Minor, Egypt, and the ancient Persian Empire. This account of his more famous exploits including his fractious relationship with his father and his quest to conquer the known world is at times thrilling, but historically suspect to say the least. Oliver Stone's film came in for criticism from all fronts. From Colin Farrell's performance as the bi-sexual Alexander, to the casting of Angelina Jolie…

Every movie enthusiast is familiar with the feeling of admiring a movie that everybody else seems to despise. Most of us have quite a few of those. I certainly have my fair share, but the movie that immediately pops into my mind in such discussions is Oliver Stone’s "Alexander".

Most critics panned the theatrical version, the box office was a letdown and it even got 6 Razzie Award nominations. This movie was on almost every level a complete failure. Flawed as it was, I did not quite get why. But then again I was only a teenager, what did I know?

In 2007, Oliver Stone released his Final Cut, which he called "Alexander Revisited". I only got around to watch…

An unmitigated disaster, Oliver Stone’s sprawling Alexander is an unbearable 173 minute alternative to Chinese water torture. No movie in recent memory combines atrocious screenwriting, atrocious acting, atrocious directing, and atrocious editing as effectively as this lumbering marathon. Its *defenders*—and they’re few in number—have hailed Alexander as a flawed, but ambitious, motion picture. I fail to see what’s so ambitious about it. Sure, Stone’s always been fascinated by conspiracies and double-crossing (JFK, Nixon) as well as societal conventions (Natural Born Killers), and he sacrifices aspects of the normal epic in Alexander to focus on Alexander’s many weaknesses—and the public perception of him throughout his life. So what? Almost all the sequences of this kind—Alexander’s initial drunken shouting match with King…

The tale of the conquests of the legendary Alexander the Great is a fascinating one, but sadly on this evidence one too great for the big screen to handle. Oliver Stone's sprawling epic traverses most of Asia to show Alexander’s exploits but in attempting to tell the whole story of the legendary hero’s life, the film is often too episodic to really grip, only tied together by Anthony Hopkins' meandering narration. For example a significant section of the film (at the beginning or in the middle depending on which cut you watch) is devoted to the battle of Gaugamela, recreated by Stone in gloriously exciting colour and detail with eagle-eye cameras that soar over the battlefield to show off the…