Alexander the Alright

Oliver Stone's epic Alexander has begun to open around Europe, so he's doing the press rounds over there, trying to explain away the film's disasterous box office take here in America.

I think it's obvious why no one went to go see this movie. It's a 3 hour examination of the life of a well-known historical figure directed by the guy who most recently directed Any Given Sunday and a documentary in praise of Fidel Castro.

Don't get me wrong...I like Stone more than most. I think his Nixon is wildly underrated, JFK is one of my favorite movies of the 90's, and Platoon ranks among my favorite Vietnam films.

But it's not exactly shocking that his latest didn't set the box office aflame. If you're a producer banking over $100 million on an Oliver Stone production, you may want to consider a career in the fast-paced world of renting movies to people at a little store on Pico. You won't be a producer for long. The last time Stone had a hit was, in fact, JFK, which raked in about $70 million and garnered several award nominations.

So how does Stone explain the movie's tepid reaction here in America? He told The Guardian it's the fault of American religious conservatism.

Sexuality is a large issue in America right now, but it isn't so much in other countries. 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 [American] south because the media was using the words: 'Alex is Gay'.

I mean, Ollie's right. The overlap of sexuality and religion ranks among the most thorny issues in contemporary American society, and his film touches upon that distinction by featuring a bisexual hero and several sequences of sexuality. And I agree with Stone that the media focused a bit too closely on the bisexual themes of the story in the months prior to its release.

But is this really why people didn't go to see his film? I doubt it. As I said before, I think running time and content was the biggest issue here - more people would have gone to see a war film starring Colin Farrell, Val Kilmer and Angelina Jolie if it wasn't 3 hours long and set in a poorly-understood ancient world. Also, you'll recall the atrocious reviews the film received across the board. This kept away people (like myself) who might have otherwise gone to see a new Oliver Stone film.