Ocean’s Twelve

Not Recommended. I dreaded having to watch this film. Paying for this movie is thievery. It’s really very simple, folks. Kindergarten lesson in morality: CRIME IS NOT COOL. If you support crime as cool, then you are morally responsible for adding to the culture of crime by encouraging kids to do so. And don’t tell me it doesn’t influence kids. Hollywood will go on moralistic crusades against displaying cigarettes in movies and they spew hatred at those who do because they say it MAKES SMOKING LOOK COOL. BUT IT’S ALL RIGHT FOR THEM TO depict crime as cool and all of a sudden, it doesn’t affect kids. What absolute hypocrites. Now they believe movies affect kids, now they don’t. Surprise! I normally try to say what I like about a film, even if I don’t agree with it, but this one is so morally bankrupt, the immorality overshadows the good. It would be like trying to say what is good about a porn film. There is a point at which the bad overcomes the good and devalues anything that might have been good. Same here. In this movie, the whole lump of dough has been leavened. The only reason why I didn’t leave half way through is because I knew I couldn’t say this with authority unless I knew how it ended. And I actually gave it the benefit of the doubt, thinking, maybe, just maybe it would have a moral twist at the end like Matchstick Men. But alas, it did not. Please don’t miss this. I am NOT saying making a movie about crime is wrong, or depicting crime is wrong. I am saying depicting crime as COOL and making it pay IS WRONG. I have no respect for these actors who protest with their self-righteous Church Lady tongue wagging that the war in Iraq is criminal, and then make a movie saying crime is cool. This is moral pollution. Do they really think God is not watching? And oh yeah, it’s just one big celebrity worship orgy. Everyone acting their parts like celebrities playing cool criminals and having a ball at it. Oh, yeah, fun! Hey, aren’t they such cool criminals! At least that’s what kids are going to think. I sure as heck didn’t. I was repulsed. The antidote to this movie is The Ladykillers, where crime starts out as cool, but then it is revealed to be what it truly is: Fool. Now that is cool.

Kinsey

Not Recommended. This movie is terribly dishonest and morally criminal. It is the cliché accusation that Christian morality suppresses natural desires which cause dysfunction in society (embodied in Kinsey’s cliché “sexually repressed” religious father, who is himself an obsessed masturbator). First of all, the fact that Kinsey is a hero is itself a sign of moral bankruptcy. If it was a tragedy, like Amadeus, I could buy it, but alas, it is not. This is supposedly the story of Alfred Kinsey, who wrote the infamous pseudo-scientific studies on male and female sexuality beginning in the 1930s. The scandal of it all is that he explored and frankly communicated details of sexuality in a culture that had suppressed talking about such things. He tried to legitimize pornography and perversion by wrapping it in an academic veneer of analysis. True, 70 years ago, society had some pretty unscientific beliefs about sexuality, like masturbation causing blindness, oral sex reduces pregnancy and the like. And it can be true that “strongly prohibited desires become an obsession.” But the fundamental philosophical and moral failure of this film is its assertion of the naturalistic fallacy. This is the belief that the way nature acts is the way nature ought to be. And it is the fundamental philosophical conceit of all pseudo-scientific endeavor that reality is purely physical and we must not apply morality to scientific pursuit. This is, of course, the dominant scientific philosophy of today. As Kinsey says, “the only way to study sex is to strip away everything but physiology.” “Human beings are just larger, slightly more complicated gall wasps.” “Every living thing is different from every other living thing,” and “diversity becomes life’s one irreducible fact.” Of course, what the filmmaker does not seem to realize is that these statements are themselves as absurd as the unscientific beliefs of the 30s that he mocks. Reductionism of reality down to mere physiology has proven over and over again, to not only be self-contradictory, but a failure in yielding accurate scientific results. Interestingly, it is still growing strong in the sociobiological movement of today that says immaterial notions like spirit, mind, love, good and evil are reducible to chemical and physical laws in our bodies. Okay, so if mind and reason are not abstract external immaterial notions of reality, but merely chemistry in our brains, then the sociobiological theory is itself not “true”, but merely the result of chemicals in the brains of naturalists, who are, I might add, a statistical minority, which makes them a natural abnormality by their own theories. The universal problem of reductionism is that it reduces itself to absurdity. And you know, diversity CANNOT be the absolute diviner of reality. Diversity simply cannot explain the UNITY that is also seen in the world. One’s metaphysic MUST explain both unity and diversity, or suffer under the weight of absurdity. If diversity (particulars) is the “one irreducible fact,” then one could NOT say there are such things as men, women, children, adults, gall wasps, and any other universal category that groups common things through similarity. Even to talk about sex itself is to categorize the idea through unity, not diversity. Yes, there is a diversity of sexuality, but sex itself is the unity under which those diverse sexualities are unified. What this really is is not science, but relativism disguised as fact. (Ironic that Kinsey was the one, in the film, who accused moralists of disguising “morality as fact.”). The obvious agenda of saying that “everything is different from everything else,” and that no sexual proclivities should fall into “biological abnormality” because there is no such thing as abnormality – the real agenda is obviously the normalization of abberant sexuality. It is interesting to note that atheistic evolutionists are now starting to admit that within their evolutionary myth, rape IS normal. IDEAS DO HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Kinsey tries to justify his pornography addiction by claiming it is “Simply the depiction of man in his natural state.” Okay, in a sense, I agree. That is, man is NATURALLY EVIL, so it does not surprise me that our natural tendencies will be toward evil, which include pornography. The fact that most of us men struggle with pornography may make it normal, but it does not make it morally right. We cannot look at nature to define good and evil. In this sense, normal and abnormal simply mean statistical averages, not moral “normality” or “abnormality” as in right and wrong. So the film is also guilty of this equivocation of bouncing back and forth between defining normal as statistical average and then as morally acceptable. A common trick of moral relativism. One of the most revealing aspects of the film is its unwitting deconstruction of its own ethic. To be fair, the filmmaker does put in some counter arguments to Kinsey in the mouths of his fellow laborers, but they are not carried out to a conclusion. Kinsey encourages his “researchers” to violate their marriage covenants and have sex with each other in the name of research and make their own pornography from it. Well, obviously this starts to screw up their marriages and families and one of the kids says, “Stop using science to justify what you’ve done.” But the kid stays with him. And then he says later, “What are we, lab rats? F—ing is no more than mere friction, mere fun?” But the kid stays with him. The point is that this set up is never paid off with the tragedy that it should have. Kinsey continues on in his stoic “Scientific” pursuit like a hero who weathers minor difficulties. Condon does not seem to realize that these mere arguments at moments of frustration to the hero’s goal are actually the moral truth revealing the actual absurdity and actual evil of Kinsey’s criminal activity. Perhaps the most telling scene of the whole movie is when Kinsey and a fellow researcher meet with a man so perverse in his sexual behavior that he has had sex with thousands of people, dozens of species of animals, and molested hundreds of pre-adolescents, all the while keeping detailed journal entries on it all. The young researcher actually has his limits and leaves, but not Kinsey. No, he says the kid just gets a little judgmental sometimes. BUT the scene is never carried out to its moral conclusion. It remains in the movie as a mere extreme of the hero’s obsession, rather than the actual refutation of Kinsey’s entire ethic that it is. What the filmmaker does not go on to tell us is that the real person this character was based on actually continued in correspondence with Kinsey who used his journal entries for his research. So KINSEY WAS A CRIMINAL and the filmmaker considers him a hero for it. An accomplice to pedophilia and crime. “Everyone should do what they want” the criminal says and Kinsey replies, “I’ve never said that. Nobody should hurt anyone.” But he did say it – when he said in the film that if everyone is having all this socially unacceptable sex, then “everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin. Everybody’s crime is nobody’s crime.” HE DID IN FACT SAY IT. The problem is that people do not want to face the logical conclusion of their own moral premises that all sexuality is acceptable. Even they believe that some sexual behavior is not acceptable. But who says so? By whose moral standard? If you deny the external objective moral absolutes of God’s Law, then you are left with nothing but the will to power, my friend. You have no moral authority to condemn ANY sexual behavior, including incest, polygamy and pedophilia. The logical conclusion of the “Kinsey ethic” of sexual relativism is precisely the moral acceptance of pedophilia. This is exactly the ultimate goal. When Kinsey says to the pedophile he shouldn’t hurt anyone, he is denying all he has ever said about making judgments and imposing morality and he DARES to be judgmental and impose HIS morality on others? You cannot strip away morality from sexual behavior without facing the logical conclusion of your belief. IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. If you say there is no morally unacceptable sexual behavior, then you must accept the pedophile because that is simply their “natural state.” And you are trying to suppress their desires just like the religious moralists try to suppress the desires of those they disagree with. The second a person places a limit on certain kinds of sexuality (pedophilia) as morally unacceptable, he is doing the very thing he accuses Christians of doing: imposing his morality on others. This, dear friends, is hypocrisy at its worst. If we are supposed to “strip away everything from sex but physiology,” then who is anyone to condemn the physiology of a pedophile or polygamist or any sexual predator? And who says we can’t hurt anyone? That is a moral judgment that Kinsey and other moral relativists say we are not allowed to make. It is arbitrary to claim you cannot hurt anyone if you have no absolute standard in your sexual ethic. After all, there are many people (as Kinsey no doubt observed) who actually like being hurt. So who are you to define “hurt” and impose it on everyone else? Condon ends with showing shots of all those “big bad laws against sexual perversion” being overthrown. But who says those laws were bad? What right does Condon and other moral relativists have in saying any law is “bad” or “wrong?” What right do they have to impose their morality on anyone through law, since all morality is relative and there is no abnormality? To strike down those sexual perversion laws is to tell moralists what they cannot do sexually, namely, maintain their own sexual views. More hypocrisy. We see in the end that this moral relativism is really just a cover for a fascistic oppression of the majority by the minority. Moral tyranny of the minority. Condon tries to justify Kinsey’s research with a tear-jerker scene of a lesbian thanking him for his books because they helped her come out of the closet and find a lesbian partner. “You saved my life, sir,” she says. And this is the obvious agenda. Kinsey’s work helped gays to be less ashamed and more acceptable in society, so what he did was good. In other words, the ends justify the means. Since Kinsey reinforced MY beliefs, the filmmaker says, it’s okay that he lied in his research, its okay that he lied about using an excessive amount of prison inmates to create the now-discredited statistic of 10% homosexuality in the population. It’s okay that he was a criminal in aiding and abetting a pedophile and using his journal as “research.” It’s okay that in the name of “science” he engaged in crime, adultery, orgies, pornography and pedophilia. THIS IS SCIENCE to these people? Of course, none of these facts are in the movie because then that would make it the moral tragedy that it should have been. Judith Reisman put it best, this movie is criminal because it lionizes Kinsey, “Leader of the most barbarous international pedophile sex ring of the twentieth century.” For the true story of Kinsey go here: < http://www.drjudithreisman.org/articles.htm>

Hero

Not Recommended. Tarantino is not to be trusted. This movie is boring. I walked out after the first third of the movie because it had no soul. Okay, I understand that these movies are the Chinese version of superheros. But I guess I just don’t like Eastern superheros because they think that emotionless expression is somehow “deep”, when all it really is is dramatically uninteresting. Human beings are emotional beings, so universal emotional suppression in all characters is simply boring drama. Yeah, yeah, my western prejudice. And in this case, my western prejudice is simply superior for dramatic story. And if you doubt that, just look at the worldwide gross of OUR superhero movies as opposed to these Eastern superhero movies, and well, your doubt will dissolve. Also, a movie that is a string of long 5 minute fight scenes, one after another, just doesn’t make good story. Sure, the choreography and cinematography is cool, but choreography and cinematography IS NOT STORY, they are enhancement to story. Without story, they become boring shallow style without substance. And that’s what Hero is: style without substance.

The Machinist

Recommended with caution. This is a great moral tale about guilt and consequences of sin. It does have a dark “arthouse” edge but it has an ultimately redeeming moral to it. My mantra is that thrillers like this are among the strongest lights of morality in a postmodern world that denies absolute morality and guilt. Christian Bale wins the award for the most extreme commitment to acting because he let his body shrink to a concentration camp victim skeleton of malnutrition in depicting a man whose guilt over his past consumes him and breaks his life apart. Not only does it break apart his own life, but hurts others as well. He can’t eat, hasn’t slept in a year, and can only buy sex from a prostitute because he cannot achieve true intimacy with anyone. He becomes paranoid that people are out to get him and has confusing perceptions of reality. He is haunted by his conscience in the form of a guy who no one else sees, and the machinist tries to kill – He’s trying to kill his conscience. His crime lies in not accepting responsibility or consequences of his own mistake in an accident that led to a death. It could be argued that this is a bit weak because the hero’s ghost is not a deliberate evil on his part, but an accident. But on the other hand, it can be more universal because he is still avoiding his responsibility for hurting others, he is running not from a crime, but his responsibility in an accident – which becomes a crime. That makes him more of an Everyman that we can all relate to. He’s not a deliberate criminal, but a normal guy with a criminal spirit. Hmmmm. Sounds to me like Total Depravity. Brad Anderson also wrote and directed Session 9, which is another EXCELLENT SCARY thriller about self-deception and suppression of evil in the soul. The Machinist is a great moral fable on par with Se7en, The Addiction, Phone Booth and Collateral. I find it not coincidental that the movie poster has the artistic shadow of a crucifix over the main character. I only pray it comes from the writer’s own worldview reflecting the origin of this notion of conscience and guilt.

National Treasure

Not Recommended. This is a boring predictable action movie. Yeah, it has a good moral: Great riches are not for one man to hoard but for sharing with the world. The hero seeks treasure but ends up giving it to the world. That’s cool. But everything else is pretty boring. I’m all for a good popcorn movie, but I like to have a secondary level that is deeper to it all. This one tries to be in that it is linked to the founding of our country, but it doesn’t work for me. One complaint: They pitch a pragmatic morality and try to link it to the founding fathers. The hero says that the founders were guilty of treason, so their founding of the country was doing wrong in order to bring about right, thus justifying his own stealing of the Declaration of Independence in order to save it. Well, sorry, but the founders were not traitors. It was a war for independence of lesser magistrates against unjust higher magistrates, it was not a revolution in the strict sense of the word. They had every moral right to withdraw from Britain, because they did it through lower magistrates, NOT through a mere populist uprising, in other words, a mob, like the French Revolution. THAT was illegal, immoral, and criminal. But the American War of Independence was both moral and legal. And these pragmatism arguments always sound good until you examine it more closely. Oh, so it’s okay to do wrong in order to accomplish right? So the ends justify the mans? Okay, then killing all poor people to get rid of poverty is justifiable on this ethic. And none of us would accept that option. Well, that’s what ends justifying the means DOES lead to. Justification of crime in the name of ultimate goodness. Pragmatic morality is criminal ethics. To be fair, the hero was in other ways, a good guy who didn’t seek to win through violence, but through his wits, and that’s good.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Not recommended. I loved the first one because it was a modern version of Pride and Prejudice. This one was uninspiring. It had gratuitous language that was off-putting. It has a good moral couched in an immoral lifestyle. Bridget learns about loyalty and trust in love, but unfortunately, she is so neurotically distrusting of Darcy that she became stupid and unsympathetic to me. How stupid is someone who mistrusts their lover without reason over and over and over again? And then, they don’t get married at the end. Very unsatisfying. Too modernist.

Finding Neverland

Hard to Recommend. This is a complex one. This film is really quite brilliant, and Oscar-worthy on all accounts of the craft. It even has some very beautiful truths in it. The problem I have with it is that it is pure Romanticism, humanistic religion. Let me explain. It’s the story of the man who created Peter Pan, Sir James Matthew Barrie. He meets a widow with three boys and befriends them all in his visits to the park. One of the boys, Peter, has lost his innocence to cyncism because of his father’s death. He doesn’t see the fun in life. He cannot play imaginatively with his brothers because it’s all just foolishness. He has a keen awareness of death. Barrie is more the child and tries to get little Peter to explore his imagination and write, because he is a good little writer. So we have a man-child teaching a child-man how to rediscover imagination, to regain his innocence lost too soon. The boy can’t have fun imagining his dog is a dancing bear because “he’s just a dog.” But Barrie explains to him that a diamond is “just a rock” without a bit of imagination. Barrie bases his character’s name, Peter Pan, on this little boy. But by the end of the story, we see little Peter explain to the stunned, Barrie and audience, “I’m not Peter Pan, HE’S Peter Pan.” So the whole theme of this story is the redemption of imagination. How realism can kill our spirits if we do not believe in the transcendence of reality. The “realists” are those whose skepticism is self destructive. Or, as Barrie puts it, “just when I find a glimmer of happiness in this world, there’s always someone who wants to destroy it.” There is a moment when Barrie’s patron laments about the theater’s loss of innocence, “They changed it. The critics. They made it important.” Some great writing throughout this work of art. Another beautiful coming of age moment occurs when the eldest brother tells Barrie not to visit his mother because even though he likes Barrie, he just doesn’t want his mother to be hurt again. Barrie responds, “Ah, there it is. In thirty seconds, you just became a man. The boy has left.” Very profound understanding of what becoming an adult is, a recognition of mortality and the concern for others. It’s a great coming of age story. It’s a wonderful romp into the world of beauty and creativity, the necessity of imagination in our lives as human beings. My problem is that the Romanticism of the worldview is a God substitute. Barrie is the artist as prophet. Imagination is salvation, a faith substitute. Art as religion, literally. And in true Romantic passion, Barrie misplaces his love onto the fun-loving widow (played by Kate Winslet) who becomes his muse, rather than on his own wife. While they do not commit physical adultery, the story is essentially emotional adultery. Another Bridges of Madison County. Argh! The Romantic, rather than fix his marriage and face his own immature selfishness, seeks elsewhere for passion. The only sin to the Romantic is to restrain the heart. “Follow your heart” is his mantra. Doing the right thing becomes oppressive to these selfish infantile narcisists. Neverland becomes the symbol for imagination, indeed salvation, and Barrie’s wife wants him to take her there (in his heart), but instead he takes the widow. In fact, his devotion to the widow and his art drives his wife to adultery and divorce, but quite frankly, he is the one to blame, making him rather unsympathetic, a jerk of a protagonist if you ask me. Anyway, this idea of art as religion is climaxed when the widow dies and we see a imaginative representation of her entering Neverland (read: heaven substitute). Barrie tells her mourning sons, “Mom is still here on every page of your imagination. She’ll be with you always.” Well, Romanticism wants to ignore God but maintain the transcendence that only God can provide. A transcendence that gives meaning to this life because this is not all there is. There is an afterlife, there is eternal life. Romanticism negates God and hijacks the language and concepts of religious faith and substitutes creativity and imagination for the deity. It worships creation in place of the Creator. This is all very unsatisfying and dishonest for a worldview that conceives of this world as all there is to create a false hope in the living by appealing to imagination. Imagination, when properly rooted in the ultimate Creator has true value and meaning in reflecting God’s image. Without this transcendence, imagination becomes self deception and creativity, mere diversion. Imagination as imago populi is idolatry and spiritual death. Imagination as imago dei is truth and redemption.

The Incredibles

Highly Recommended. I won’t say it. I won’t say it was “incredible.” No. It was FANTASTIC. Pixar is the greatest animation studio since Disney started. In fact, they have become what Disney has failed to maintain, the animated family film studio. I absolutely loved the pro-family nature of this film. A family that bickers and is not being themselves, who have to draw together and use their special abilities to not only save the world, but save each other as well. Some tight-lipped prissies will say that the family was discordant and always bickering which did not support harmony in family. And these people do not know what they are talking about. Just cause a family bickers does not mean they are not harmonious on a deeper level. Anyone who claims that they do have a happy family that doesn’t bicker at all is not fooling anyone but themself. I have to admit this, that the scenes of the family drawing together to save each other, along with their friend, the freezer superhero, actually made me tear up because every act of drawing together and helping each other was an ACT of harmony and familial love that supported the ultimate bond that a family should have. I loved the kids. I loved how each of their super powers reflected their own character type or personality. The girl who can turn invisible and create force fields around herself is a shy girl who hides and protects herself from hurt. The speedy boy is an ADD kid. The stretch mom is a mom who stretches herself for everyone in her family, and the super dad is a testosterone fiend looking for excitement. I loved it. The theme of “the hero in all of us” or the “special value of each person” was very beautiful. And even the sociocultural picture of our society was profound. In the story, people start sueing super heros for saving them when they didn’t want to be saved or the collateral damage that occurs in the midst of the saving. Sound familiar? This gets to the point that all superheros can no longer afford the legal cost of saving people so they stop it and become “normal.” Well, how real is this? THIS IS AMERICA. We have a society where criminals sue their victims and win, where single selfish individuals win outrageous lawsuits that hurt medical or scientific industries. Law suits have become a new form of legitimized crime. We are a litigious society that blames everyone else for our own sins and wants everyone else to pay for it. We have a society of mediocrity where employees who seek excellence are castigated by the rest of the employees because excellence makes their mediocrity look bad. I know, I’ve seen this myself. Consequently good people who would help society are hindered in doing so because of the selfish mediocrity and jealousy of others. This entitlement mentality and blameshifting culture is destroying goodness and righteousness in our country. The Incredibles makes all good fun of this fault, but it leaves you with a profound revelation as well. This entitlement and blameshifting is squelching the “super heros” around us. The Incredibles brings back goodness and excellence and roots it in the family like no movie I’ve seen I a long time.

Alexander

Not Recommended at all. BORING. A movie about Alexander the Great done by Oliver the Amateur. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how studio execs just keep giving away tons of money to this guy who makes terrible movies that don’t make money. I am personally offended by Stone’s arrogant selfishness that actually thinks he deserves three hours for all his movies when they barely deserve one hour fifty minutes. He reminds me of Scorsese. These guys are the kings of terrible epics and colossal wastes of money. Everything is too long from the very start of the boringly drawn out title sequence in the beginning, followed by a long boring droning and redundant monologue by Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy, Then followed by long boring battle sequences that are attempted to be salvaged by giving it a Lord of the Rings rip off soundtrack. We see a long boring inspirational speech by Alexander to his troops when facing King Darius. This is so boring, even to Stone himself, that he fades out of it and onto a flying eagle, and then fades back into the boring speech being boringly concluded. Well, I’ve got to say, Stone didn’t have a conspiracy here, so that’s new, I guess. Not only is it way too long and boring, but you just don’t care for any of the characters, including Alexander himself. Look, let’s face it, all these lines about undying eternal love and devotion just don’t ring with truth at all in the mouths of Mr. multisexual Alex and his sex buddy. Try as hard as he may, it’s inherently fallacious. Most people just won’t buy it. (There is a reference to Achilles and Patroclus 6 times). And besides, what’s so heroic about this genocidal murdering bloody warrior, who invaded other countries, not even for gold or wealth, (which is supposed to be some kind of virtue to the Stone) but simply to conquer and be king of all. Yeah, that’s a real hero. What a great guy for trying to unify the whole world — UNDER HIS THUMB. So Communist Stone complains and criticizes George Bush, but then makes a movie glorifying the very kind of conquering and subduing that he claims Bush is engaged in. Go figure. Of course, Stone tries to smooth it over by making Alexander a P.C. modernist. He’s for the gay marriage laws, (“there are other ways of loving”), and he is Mr. Multiculturalist. In a world of racist nationalists, he believes in interracial dating and even interracial marriage. Okay, his multiculturalism lies in believing all the peoples and nations HE IS CONQUERING are equal in worth and value. “None of these poor suckers we are killing and subjugating and enslaving are inferior to us Greeks (like all those snobbish Macedonian advisors of his believe).” He actually says he is “freeing all peoples” to be under his rule. Wait a minute. Does anybody else see the obvious absurdity here, or am I just crazy? Freeing people by conquering and killing them? Let’s call him Alexander the Marauding Multiculturalist. Well, they got one thing right, multiculturalism’s kinship with Fascism. So Alexander is this “great” leader who is basically a man of action. This is another existential movie that scorns “those who think too much” and trumpets at the very beginning a quote from Virgil: “Fortune favors the bold.” Alexander spouts platitudes, half of which I couldn’t even hear in the midst of a noisey audio mix. “Fear of death is the cause of all our misfortunes.” “Conquer your fear, and I promise you, you will conquer death.” “We’ve all suffered. In the end, all that matters is what you’ve done.” So we are the sum total of our choices or actions. Action is elevated in this amoral universe, that again, Stone would attack if it was a person on the opposite side of his political beliefs doing all the “bold action.” You get it? These kind of filmmakers think they are being profound by exalting “action” without morality, and then cry like clubbed baby seals when a man of action does WHAT THEY DON’T LIKE. That’s called hypocrisy, self-deception. I mean, just apply this existential amoral “bold action” to Stone’s boogeyman, Bush again. Hey, Bush is bold and a man of action in invading Iraq. So I guess Oliver Stone must have voted for Bush. Not that I agree with Bush, but I know Stone has expressed his hate speech against him. Send out the word: Oliver Stone supports Bush’s bold invasion of Iraq. An odd moment that totally said, “Editing nightmare” occurred after we see this big battle with Babylon and then we see King Darius flee the battle. And then we cut to Alexander weeping over a soldier who died, looking very regretful and like a loser. Then we hear Ptolemy’s narration telling us Darius was defeated and Alexander won. What? What kind of a non-sequitur was that? And an anti-climactic one at that. This movie was so boring, that you would not miss a thing by not seeing it. The court intrigue was boring, just a bunch of people trying to speak with subtext that you don’t even care about, and the long boring war councils talking about stuff that simply wasn’t interesting, and of course, Ptolemy’s long boring narration throughout and over the transition periods. Who cares. I’ll take the pagan Gladiator any day over this broing drivel.