Oliver Stone blames morality for "Alexander" flop

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Referring to American fundamentalism as “raging,” director Oliver Stone blames the failure of recent film Alexander on moralists.

Here’s the story, from Yahoo! news.

Now that that’s settled, hey Oliver! Make us a movie we want to see. 😃 I, for one, would like a nice epic on the life of the legendary King David.
 
Seems to be the popular thing to say - blame all your failures on someone else. It’s our fault that Stone has lost his touch & is making crappy movies that nobody really wants to see? Maybe he should wake up & realize that he has way too much money already & needs to retire.
 
So what does he want, us to become immoral so he can make money? If the left wing is the majority, as they want everyone to believe, why didn’t they support him?
 
What a scream. Like we’re all supposed to be thrilled–hey, man, did you know Alexander the Great was GAY?? wow, man–like I never heard about that before. How much mileage was he expecting to get out of that revelation? I heard the movie was just a stinker, for many legitimate dramatic and historical reasons. Since I’m pretty much “off” movies anyway, I’m not going to waste my time to see for myself. Been burned too often.
 
Well…a deeper question needs to be asked of Stone…since he knows of this “raging morality” why did he choose to go forward and make a film with so much UNVERIFIABLE homosexuality overtones to it? Why did he think he would cash in on such a flick whne all he had to do was look at the money The Passion made? THAT right there should have told hm where the MAJORITY of Americans are in their UNMANUFACTURED MEDIA INDUCED ILLUSION of what real morality reflects?

Answer: He already KNOWS that…but him and others are HELL BENT on trying to recreate reality cause they dont wanna accept the fact that Morality is important to people…and Stone and the AMORALISTS are fully prepared to spend and LOSE MILLIONS to do so.
 
From a classicist :

Our closest modern American notion relative to the sex practices of either ancient sophisticates or ancient randy soldiers might be characterized not as omnivorous pedophilia per se, but as a subset of pederasty: the sexual attraction toward young boys of older men, often otherwise “heterosexual,” who seem both indifferent to men their own age and yet not interested in being a passive actor in sexual congress with youths. In present-day society we hear of all this — from the lurid accounts of bachelor Western clergy to married Pashtun tribesmen in the Hindu Kush, who often seek out sexual apprentices among poorer boys, orphans, or those eager to emulate martial bravery.
Whether such homoerotic desire is an expression of innate homosexual tendencies in either participant or more a reflection of the many heterosexual obstacles within tribal societies — involving the sanctity of female virginity, the relative scarcity of educated and empowered women, or life in a mostly male society — is not quite clear either in the present or the past. But what is unmistakable is that in the ancient Mediterranean occasional sex with feminine-looking men or adolescents did not earn the reproach of “acting queer” as it still does in the modern world. In most cases, acts per se did not equate to either a lifestyle or an orientation. Thus it makes little sense to speculate whether figures as diverse as Plato and Philip II were akin to our notion of “gays.”

Alexander’s Macedonians were both more and less tolerant of homosexuality as we would describe it than the modern world, focusing not on the desire per se for male sexual companionship, but rather on the method of its manifestation. In some sense, the Macedonian evening communal tent was not unlike the savage world of the modern prison. In both, constant male intimacy created a strange classification of masculinity, in which active roles involving penetration were seen as quasi-normal sexual expression, a sort of surrogate intercourse when women are not to be found. Those weaker, prettier, or younger who are “used” are seen as little more than “women,” and alone suffer the abuse of surrendering their male identity, whether by inclination or under coercion.

Stone seems to grasp none of this complexity. But had he really believed that Alexander’s sex life should not be separate from his remarkable career, then it would have been portrayed as incidental rather than as essential to his persona, and in no way much different from that of the men he led. In contrast, if Stone, quite without historical support, really believed that Alexander’s desire was both unusual for the time and at the heart of his ambiguous legacy as both founder and destroyer of innumerable cities, then he should have explored the asceticism, rather than the indulgence, of Alexander. The ancients believed not that Alexander was obsessed with sex or that he was at all kinky in his tastes, but that his carnal desires were oddly sublimated to an array of other concerns, from mysticism and religion to Asian politics and fashionable foreign cults.

Indeed, it’s less likely that sex was at the root of Alexander’s relationships with his mother Olympias and his companion Hephaistion, and his various liaisons with Eastern princesses, than that Alexander was — unlike his lusty Macedonian compatriots — rather asexual. He may have liked young men around in the fashion of an aesthete Epaminondas, Lord Kitchener, or General Douglas Haig, and might even have often enjoyed male outlets in the manner of Frederick the Great or Kemal Ataturk, but Alexander the Great was more likely a bore in the bedroom. He was surely not in the class of a Caesar, Napoleon, or Wellington — whose sexual appetites are still irrelevant to understanding their military legacies.

In the beginning, youthful naïveté and half-baked idealism, and later, paranoia, alcoholism, and gratuitous cruelty — never occasional homosexual desire — were at the root of Alexander’s personal enigma. The sex we get from Oliver Stone is either historically misleading or incidental to what made Alexander what he was. So Alexander is more about the prurience and fashion of Malibu and Hollywood than about how the world itself was changed by a single man in the latter 4th century B.C.

Mr. Hanson is a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Other Greeks and other books on the ancient world.

victorhanson.com/articles/hanson121804.html
 
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Cherub:
Referring to American fundamentalism as “raging,” director Oliver Stone blames the failure of recent film Alexander on moralists.

Here’s the story, from Yahoo! news.

Now that that’s settled, hey Oliver! Make us a movie we want to see. 😃 I, for one, would like a nice epic on the life of the legendary King David.
Click to expand...
Oliver Stone is out of his mind.
 
America bashing is the first and best way to promote your movies in Europe. Oliver isn’t the first hollyweird type to snicker at the wee folks of the fruited plain, and he won’t be the last, sadly.
 
Frankly, I’m surprised how tame his statements are.

I mean, come on! This is Oliver Stone! He must be slipping badly. 15 years ago, the reason would have been that the Vatican sent assasin teams to intimidate theater owners into pretending to offer the film, but then only sell a dozen of so tickets to each showing…
 
Of course, he wouldn’t consider blaming it on his lack of morals. 😉
 
Do you all hear that violin playing? I wonder if he is going to allow Walmart to carry it when it comes out on DVD… since he made fun on the president say he looked like her got his suit at Walmart. :rolleyes:
 
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