Hey Oliver Stone, Your Movie Was Just Horrible, OK?

Oliver Stone is whining again because his movie “Alexander” stunk it up at the box office. Rather than put the onus on himself for making a film that has gotten horrible reviews, Stone not only denounces, “American critics and audiences, saying they had focused solely on the issue of homosexuality,” he suggests that President Bush should shoulder some of the blame for perhaps the worst Hollywood bomb since Waterworld.

Let’s take a look at what Stone has to say in more detail, shall we?

Amusingly enough, Stone complains that the “gay issue” was “overblown.” I say, “amusingly enough,” because the reason that Alexander’s sexuality got so much attention was because Stone gave an incendiary interview to Playboy in which he said things like,

“We go into his bisexuality. It may offend some people, but sexuality in those days was a different thing. Pre-Christian morality. Young boys were with boys when they wanted to be.”

&

“You only need five words. Alexander says, ‘Stay with me tonight, Hephaistion,’ and you get it. If you don’t get it, f— you, it’s your problem.”

I could also add that while Alexander may have been “bisexual” (and I say may have been because there is some controversy over that issue and its significance in Alexander’s day), it certainly wasn’t a pivotal issue in life. Choosing to make that into a significant issue in the movie was a mistake by Stone equivalent to doing a movie about George Washington and spending an inordinate amount of time focusing on his false teeth.

Furthermore, this sort of casually stupid comparison is particularly offensive, although sadly all too common these days on the left…

“Stone, a three-time Oscar winner and director of acclaimed films including “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July”, said his latest venture had fallen victim to events in Iraq.

“Because Alexander at times sounds like George (W.) Bush, (people) get the two confused,” he said.

“I think it makes people feel queasy about empire and the concepts that Alexander espoused, but Alexander was not attacking the east in order to drain it of its resources. He stayed in the east.”

Bush has liberated 50 million people from monstrous regimes and he gets unfavorably compared to Alexander for it? Alexander was certainly a gigantic figure who left his mark on history, but he was also the Hitler of his day, a megalomaniacal butcher who strived for world conquest. Here’s a little more on what Alexander was really like

“Like Napoleon, who caused the death of hundreds of thousands in Russia and Iberia, while lecturing on the sacrifices needed to bring Revolutionary egalitarianism to Europe, Alexander’s “Brotherhood of Man” – a purportedly noble Hellenic effort to civilize and unite Asia into a kinder and gentler continent – was the brilliant rhetorical veneer that rested atop millions of corpses.

Mass death followed him everywhere. Alexander levelled the hallowed city of Thebes – 20,000 enslaved, 6,000 butchered. He rounded up and liquidated 15,000 Greek captured soldiers after the battle of Granicus. Tens of thousands more were slain during – and again after – the sieges of Miletus, Halicarnassus (334), Sagalassus (333), Tyre and Gaza (332), all as grand precursors to the incineration of Persepolis. The dirty, asymmetrical warring between 331 and 326 in Afghanistan and Bactria took the highest toll, where whole regions were ethnically cleansed. The vainglorious, wholly unnecessary march back from the Indus River through the Gedrosian desert caused more Macedonian deaths than all the phalangites lost to the Persians and Indians in four horrendous battles, slugfests themselves that claimed tens of thousands of the enemy.

Add to this tally the random murders of Macedonian cavaliers – Cleitus stabbed in a drunken rage, Philotas executed after a show-trial, seventy-year-old Parmenio beheaded, and the generals Cleander and Sitacles along with 600 of their soldiers dispatched. The cranky philosopher and historian Callisthenes was finally done away with, and so were hundreds of Macedonian pages. Alexander, the philosopher king, introduced the popularity of both decimation and crucifixion into the Western world.”

If Bush were half as monstrous as Alexander, Stone would have been crucified on Hollywood Blvd already in order to send a message to all the other liberal celebrities. You’d think Stone would understand that since he just made a movie about Alexander and presumably learned something about what sort of man he was. But given that we’re talking about a man with a soft spot for Fidel Castro, I guess we can’t expect that rationality is his strong suit…

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