Alexander: Bad Buzz Reaches Crescendo
By nearly all accounts, Oliver Stone's Alexander is a huge, nearly unwatchable mess (all for the bargain price of $160 million). The NYT's Manohla Dargis runs down a partial checklist of what went wrong with the epic:
This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him. Certainly it's brought out the worst in terms of the puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas.
Fair enough, but does Colin Farrell still fuck a eunuch? Because if Warner Bros. moved back the film because they thought conservative moviegoers would balk at the frank depiction of Alexander's sexuality, we hope they at least had the decency to leave in the eunuch-fucking. You just can't get that kind of hot pansexual action in a run-of-the-mill botched epic.