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Home Front: Culture Wars
Stone blames 'fundamentalism' in US for 'Alexander' flop
2005-01-06
Yeah. It didn't suck. It was... "fundamentalism"! That's the ticket!
Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone blamed "raging fundamentalism in morality" for the frosty reception that his new film "Alexander" is getting in his native United States.
If it bombs in Europe what will the excuse be?
In London for its British premiere, Stone, 58, said that after a career full of cage-rattling work, he thought a biopic of Alexander the Great, the 4th century Macedonian-born conquerer, would be "a safe subject". But he said he was "quite taken aback by the controversy and fierceness of the reviews" which greeted its US release, including outrage at the film's suggestion that Alexander was bisexual.
Most of the reviews I read thought it was hilarious.
"Sexuality is a large issue in America right now, but it isn't so much in other countries," he said. "There's a raging fundamentalism in morality in the United States. From day one audiences didn't show up. They didn't even read the reviews in the south because the media was using the words: 'Alex is Gay'."
Suppose that beats "Ollie: Box Office Poison".
"Alexander" stars Colin Farrell and Angelina Jolie, both seen at the London premiere, but its US box office take so far has been less than a quarter of the 150 million dollars that it cost to make.
Don't worry. There's always that DVD money, Ollie. I'm sure you'll clean up there if the "fundamentalists" don't get you banned out of Blockbuster. Sure you will.
Posted by:tu3031

#39  OK - I'm gonna defend Kevin - for some films. Open Range and Bull Durham are classix. He's great in westerns and baseball - limited range. See Open Range, with Robert Duvall, and tell me I'm wrong.
Posted by: Frank G   2005-01-06 7:45:26 PM  

#38  TGA is right. Watching Costner is like a flat line on a heart monitor. The only movie worse than Waterworld was the Postman. I wwill never forget that slow motion of Kevin picking up the letter from the kid. That scene alone must have lasted two hours. As loony as he is, there is evidence that Stone is not brain dead. Costner is comotose even on his good days.
Posted by: Sgt.D.T.   2005-01-06 7:38:00 PM  

#37  Which scene from the movie is #9 from, and which one is Collin Farrell?
Posted by: ed   2005-01-06 2:36:10 PM  

#36  Well, I saw it in the hopes of it being halfway decent history-wise, (I plead temprorary insanity) and was, of course, completely disapointed. He spent so much time on sex that Alexander's campaign got lost in the plot twists.
I will agree though, that the death scene was funny...I was one of those who laughed...
Posted by: S   2005-01-06 2:30:53 PM  

#35  people in the audience were laughing out loud, during the touching death scenes

I saw a clip of 'the' scene. You'd laugh too (think junior highschool Shakespeare play).
Posted by: Pappy   2005-01-06 1:06:11 PM  

#34  LotR: That's easy: that island that they landed on at the end ? Everest.
Posted by: Carl in N.H.   2005-01-06 12:41:36 PM  

#33  First I hated Waterworld, but the cost was not really the problem. See the built big floating sets (Costner didn't want to use indoor sets) and the sets were destroyed by a bad storm. So new sets and hotel bills while actors sat around and waited were all built into that huge cost.

If Waterworld cost what it originally was intended to it would have come and gone without notice, just like Steel Dawn.
Posted by: RJ Schwarz   2005-01-06 12:40:38 PM  

#32  Well, for the ladies, it has some redeeming features-kinda the same reason you fellas watch "Girls Gone Wild". Thanks, .com, for the graphic-I'm suddenly very thirsty.

;)
Posted by: Jules 187   2005-01-06 12:23:40 PM  

#31  I dunno Carl, the whole ocean being so deep that Everest is almost covered was a bit much. There ain't that much water on the planet.
Posted by: Laurence of the Rats   2005-01-06 11:58:30 AM  

#30  Now, Seafarious, given your handle, you're just biased toward Waterworld...

I liked it too, but agree with your assessment. Also, the whole Kevin Costner-with-gills thing was an unnecessary detail that only served to break the suspension of disbelief.
Posted by: Carl in N.H.   2005-01-06 11:48:08 AM  

#29  Hey Kev, bad guys make the movie. Kudos to Hopper - the Deacon stole the show.
Posted by: Rightwing   2005-01-06 11:40:56 AM  

#28  Seafarious, Waterworld has been on German TV about five times now and I have never been able to watch it to the end.
Posted by: True German Ally   2005-01-06 11:34:31 AM  

#27  Face it Stone the movie must just suck. Haven't seen it yet - I'll advise. Angelina is always a treat.
Posted by: Rightwing   2005-01-06 11:28:36 AM  

#26  I disagree, TGA. I enjoyed Waterworld; Costner just didn't need to spend *that* much money or *that* much ego on it...
Posted by: Seafarious   2005-01-06 11:24:10 AM  

#25  Sorry Kevin, Waterworld probably sucked even more than Alex the Gay.
Posted by: True German Ally   2005-01-06 11:14:53 AM  

#24  "Sexuality is a large issue in America right now, but it isn’t so much in other countries," he said. "There’s a raging fundamentalism in morality in the United States. From day one audiences didn’t show up. They didn’t even read the reviews in the south because the media was using the words: ’Alex is Gay’."

Yes, that's exactly it: raging fundamentalism. That's what killed the movie. You might want to change the story a bit, however, when that Kevin Bacon movie about the pedophile makes money hand-over-fist and receives an Oscar nomination.
Posted by: BH   2005-01-06 11:09:40 AM  

#23  "Dances With Wolves". Now that was a great movie. Now available on DVD by the way.
Posted by: Kevin Costner   2005-01-06 11:03:17 AM  

#22  A co-worker went to see it, and reported that people in the audience were laughing out loud, during the touching death scenes!
With a mediocre director, low budget, hackneyed plot and bad actors (garbage in, garbage out) the expected result is a lousy movie, but it takes a real gift to be a top-rankled director with a huge budget, riveting story and talented actors... and still manage to produce a real bow-wow of a movie. Only "Battlefield Earth" got nastier reviews.
Posted by: Sgt. Mom   2005-01-06 10:57:06 AM  

#21  Ollie lost me with the 'Army killed him' JFK movie, but who knows I hear he is doing docudrama on Castro. I can see it now: "Castro the Musical!" I am surprised that the loyal nutjobs and pro-gay everything people didn't show up to see the movie.
Posted by: Cyber Sarge   2005-01-06 10:54:23 AM  

#20   Stone made a bad movie and no one wanted to see it. At $8 a ticket,15 million tickets would have been $120mil. 15mil is 1/4 of Kerry vote,who I doubt were fundamentalists. And just how much did Moore's anti-Bush fakurama make?
Stone laid out his excuses before movie flopped,now he is in full damage control so he can still direct big budget films.
I can't wait til we hear how Stone taking French citizenship to help get financing was reason Americans didn't go see the flopic.
Posted by: Stephen   2005-01-06 10:17:37 AM  

#19  I saw a special on History Channel where Colin Farrell and the extras were being taught tactics and trained to fight like the Macedonians. They stressed how they were trying to be as accurate as possible to recreate the battle agaist the Persians. It looked like it was going to be great, what a disapointment. Movie sucked.
Posted by: Steve   2005-01-06 9:42:00 AM  

#18  He's at number 43 and heading DOWN. ROTFL
http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.html
Posted by: Tom   2005-01-06 9:14:31 AM  

#17  LOL .com
shouldnt his 'bum bag' be round the back :P
Posted by: MacNails   2005-01-06 8:26:16 AM  

#16  Almost all the movie critics are anti religious (and probably 50% are gay).

They hate Alex the G anyway.
Posted by: mhw   2005-01-06 8:25:14 AM  

#15  The real question to Stone should be, "Why haven't you been relegated to directorial limbo like Michael Cimino, after he did 'Heaven's Gate'?"
Posted by: Anonymoose   2005-01-06 8:23:20 AM  

#14  German critics yawned and it's a flop here, too.

Maybe Stone tries to promote the movie here with "hated in USA"?
Posted by: True German Ally   2005-01-06 8:02:25 AM  

#13  .com, are you trying to make me throw up?
Posted by: Deacon Blues   2005-01-06 7:54:40 AM  

#12  So read Mary Renalt's "Persian Boy" and be done with it. So he had a male lover. Yawn. It was the cultural norm in Greeece at the time. Yawn.
Posted by: Weird Al   2005-01-06 7:46:29 AM  

#11   "4th century Macedonian-born conquerer"A.C.E,wasn't Alex aloooong time before Christ?
Posted by: raptor   2005-01-06 7:16:58 AM  

#10  An older, but still no wiser, Oliver Stone seen shopping in The Village some years hence.
Posted by: .com   2005-01-06 3:35:16 AM  

#9  Alexander's Army holding a recruiting drive event as envisioned by Ollie The Magnificent...
Posted by: .com   2005-01-06 3:25:01 AM  

#8  oliver stone SUCKS! What happened to his "automatic" audience, liberals? Evidently, they think his movie sucks also.
Posted by: Floting Granter5198   2005-01-06 3:03:16 AM  

#7  Let's try this again:

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT ALEXANDER WAS BI. THE PROBLEM WAS THAT THAT'S HALF THE MOVIE. :P
Posted by: Edward Yee   2005-01-06 1:41:37 AM  

#6  Dude, your movie, like, sucked.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom   2005-01-06 1:09:26 AM  

#5  Some of the elephants that played the part of "battle tank" in Alexander are now starring as backhoes in the tsunami clean up...
Posted by: Seafarious   2005-01-06 12:53:48 AM  

#4  Yeah, Ollie-boy. It's the Fundamentalists fault you made another bomb and pissed away another fortune. It's not the fact that your bomb virtually ignored Alexander's impact spreading Helenistic culture across the Western world and a part of the East...or his innovative strategic and tactical battlefield tactics...his engineering feats (Tyre)...or his incredible use of logistics.

No let's focus on his sexual orientation, give him a hottie for a mamma and an oedipus complex. Yeah ..that's worth spending 3 hours and $200 million on.

Friggin idiot.
Posted by: anymouse   2005-01-06 12:47:53 AM  

#3  after a career full of cage-rattling work, he thought a biopic of Alexander the Great, the 4th century Macedonian-born conquerer, would be "a safe subject"

A career full of what? So, um, let me get this straight, Stone thinks he's, what, Socrates? A social gadfly to keep Americans honest? LOL! One of the looniest moonbats to ever script or direct a picture, who has bent, twisted, hammered and revised history to suit his own peculiar views, and he's to be lauded for this as a social critic, rather than as the bad movie-maker he is? Does the low box-office take of your last N pictures even register with you, Ollie?

The only thing you got right was choosing Alexander The Great as a topic worthy of examination. You just made the mistake of not handing it off to someone with talent and that flair for honesty. Look it up, methinks you need to refresh the meaning. Poor Alexander - conquered the known world - and placed in the hands of such a wanker.

And Whatshisname, that actor. Sad. Had potential.
Posted by: .com   2005-01-06 12:39:27 AM  

#2  If the US is Fundamentalist and they are the biggest market for movies why would you make a movie likely to tick them off?

Is Stone saying the blue state liberals are also Fundamentalist because I don't think they showed up to see his little picture either.
Posted by: RJ Schwarz   2005-01-06 12:33:28 AM  

#1  yawn. Yeah right. As we all know, the fundamentalists are the biggest supporters of R rated films, so no doubt their absence really impacted sales. Not a bad move though, as I suppose this will make the lefties lemmings feel compelled to go support his sucky film. Suckers.
Posted by: 2b   2005-01-06 12:32:04 AM  

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