Epicdemic

So I saw Oliver Stone's "Alexander" over the weekend.

Let me just say I am a huge fan of epic, saga-like historical and quasi-historical stories. Gandhi. The Ten Commandments. Spartacus. Ben-Hur. The Lord of the Rings, preferably in the extended editions. It doesn't have to be films, either. I've sat through three complete cycles of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, and once saw Parsifal twice in the same week. If that's not kooky enough, I saw The Two Towers seven times in the theater.

I also can enjoy seriously bad movies, for example, anything with Jean-Claude van Damme (at least before he started directing his own movies), or anything where an iguana shot in close-up appears to be threatening a city made from railroad model kits.

Rarely in my life have I ever been as bored as I was during Alexander. It has all of the elements I love: exotic locations, elaborate sets and costumes, cast of thousands. It has the added benefit of being true (sort of). Then of course there's that whole gay thing.

What this movie lacked, above all else, was a script. Yes, I heard people talking, but I don't remember anything they said. It wasn't overblown, stilted "look at me being historical" dialogue (think Charlton Heston). It certainly wasn't razor-sharp wit. It wasn't even dry academic fact regurgitation. It was just the barest force necessary to move this lumbering elephant of a movie along to its whimpering end. How Angelina Jolie managed to wrest her pathologically committed performance out of the infertile dust of this screenplay is a mystery on the scale of Genesis.

Oh, how I have longed for a gay hero on the silverscreen. A macho, muscular, attractive, virile, sword-wielding genius of a military strategist with a boyfriend. As the old proverb goes, "Be careful what you wish for." Colin Farrell and Jared Leto -- both exceptionally attractive people -- have absolutely zero chemistry together. The scene where a weepy Hephaistion brings Alexander a ring on his wedding night, which he slips onto the ring finger, no less, could have been either deeply touching or scandalously bold (ideally both). Instead it became ludicrous when Mrs. The Great, aka Roxane, catches them and stutters out, "You....luff...heem?" It's not clear whether she's tormented more by the realization that she's a big-boobed political pawn of a breeding trophy-wife (aka, beard; see McGreevey, Mrs.) or whether she's just having difficulty conversing in this obscure Gaelic dialect of Macedonian.

Alex and Heph have a couple of nice buddy hugs, but the only kiss is shared between Alex and his Babylonian eunuch, Mona Lisa, who seems to have been instructed by Stone not to act at all, so that he didn't overshadow Leto. No, the gayest performance in the movie comes from Angelina Jolie, for whom they should create a special Oscar category: Best Performance by a Drag Queen in a Supporting Role.

My friends warned me that I'd be disappointed, but I assumed it was because they underestimated my fetish for long, terrible movies. Alas, from the technicolor alternate-reality sequence of the doomed battle in India (if there's one thing we learned from South Pacific, it's that magenta filters are a bad idea) to Ptolemy's last-minute "scratch that" whitewash of Alexander's demise this movie is a disaster. On an epic scale.