Preview Review
ALEXANDER
AFTER THE UNPRECEDENTED burqa-whoopin' in Afghanistan three years ago, every middlebrow in America got a raging hard-on for empire. Even Newsweek devoted an entire issue to celebrating America as the greatest imperial power the world has ever known.
Then a funny little thing happened on the Via Appia to global domination? We got knocked out in the second round of the War on Terror, ground into shawarma meat by a Division-III team called "Iraq," a defeat so painful and drawn-out that it makes the Yankees debacle look mercifully clean and gutsy by comparison. America's imperial hard-on prematurely ejaculated while dry humping the Middle East, and now every monkey with a scimitar and a handicam is laughing at us all the way to the Saudi-funded safehouse.
So why the fuck is Hollywood bombarding us with imperial-glory epics like Troy, The Alamo and now Alexander? Is it a case of Communist Hollywood mocking decent patriotic Americans? Or is it just that it takes three years to convert the imperial hard-on into a finished feature, and no one could have ever imagined that the mightiest empire in human history could have folded so quickly over the first little sign of resistance?
Whatever the motivation, the preview to this Oliver Stone epic about Alexander the Great was like having a festering scab ripped open by an Iraqi dead-ender, who then handicams your open scab and then one day, while you're browsing ogrish.com, you spot, to your horror, a posting of the video-taped ripping open of your festering scab, headlined, "Video of dead-ender ripping open your scab, laughing."
Alexander the Great was the son of a successfully imperialist father, Philip of Macedonia. In order to make his dead daddy proud, Alexander conquered the known world by the age of 25, and then had the decency to die by the age of 32.
By contrast, America has George W. Bush, the incarnation of imperial decadence on a scale unlike anything ever seen. The son of a sleazy, mildly successful imperialist, George Jr. blew the whole fucking empire, carefully amassed over a century of cold-blooded hedging, simply because blowing daddy's wealth is the only thing he's good at.
In the preview to Alexander, we are told, "Fortune favors the bold." Morons like our president-and the director, Oliver Stone, a talentless, macho hippie with no right getting within a thousand cubits of the Alexander story-hear stupid management-seminar clichés like that and actually believe it, act on it and bequeath the consequences to decent, hard-working Americans like you and me.
If you have any love of country left, boycott this movie. I don't know about you, but I am getting tired of seeing my country laughed at.