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Despite
a couple of good battles, Oliver Stone's hero is
more blond than brutal, his character more epicene
than epic
Alexander
(173 mins, 15)
Directed by Oliver Stone; starring Colin Farrell,
Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Christopher Plummer
Turtles Can Fly
(95 mins, 15)
Directed by Bahman Ghobadi; starring Soran Ebrahim,
Hirsh Feyssal
Undead
(104 mins 15)
Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig; starring
Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins
White Noise
(97 mins, 15)
Directed by Geoffrey Sax; starring Michael Keaton,
Deborah Kara Unger, Ian McNeice
End of the Century: The Story of The Ramones
(112 mins, PG)
Directed by Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia;
starring the Ramones
'Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules,' as
the old song goes, but not in the cinema. There are
a dozen movies about the mythical Hercules (whom
Alexander revered as Herakles) for every one about
the historical Alexander. These are a mere two -
Robert Rossen's 1956 epic starring Richard Burton in
a fetching mini-skirt and a marcel-waved blond
coiffure which makes him look infinitely more camp
than the gay barber he played in Staircase, and
Colin Farrell as the megalomaniac Macedonian in
Oliver Stone's Alexander.
You could throw in Terence Rattigan's 1949 play,
Adventure Story, which starred a young Paul Scofield
as Alexander. It was taken to task by Rattigan's
admirer, TC Worsley, for being too cinematic ('We
have often been given the film of a play before now,
but this must be the first occasion when we have
been given the play of a film, even before the film
was made') and dismissed by his detractor Kenneth
Tynan for being too British ('His pagan legionnaires
move like gods and talk like prefects').
Rattigan tells the story in flashback from
Alexander's deathbed; Rossen takes it
chronologically from Alexander's birth to his death;
Stone has the story narrated long after the events
by Alexander's lieutenant, Ptolemy (Anthony
Hopkins), to a clerk in the Alexandria library.
All three employ the device of using ancient maps to
trace the general progress from Macedonia to the end
of the known world. Of these versions, Stone's
Alexander is the best in almost every way. That is
not to make any great claims for it, though it does
suggest that the American critics, who've greeted
the picture with relentless sneers, are unacquainted
with the competition.
The film deals quite well with the notion of a young
man developing world-conquering dreams as he grows
up in the shadow of an overbearing warrior-father
(Val Kilmer as a drunken, one-eyed Philip) and an
insanely ambitious mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie),
who is constantly seen wrapped in phallic snakes,
which she uses as symbols of ever-present treachery.
Under the tutelage of Aristotle (played by
Christopher Plummer as a jovially suspect
public-school master), Alexander turns out to be a
bright lad, drawn to homosexuality. He thus belongs
to, or perhaps created in the 4th century BC, that
tradition of bisexual military leaders that
stretches from Julius Caesar to Lord Kitchener and
TE Lawrence. Stone treats with sensitivity his
relationship with the apparent love of his life,
Hephaistion (Jared Leto) but does go slightly
overboard when Alexander is driven crazy by some
homoerotic dancers in India.
Unlike most big-scale historical movies, Alexander
is never truly risible. Colin Farrell's tousled
blond locks, for instance, are no odder than Brad
Pitt's in Troy, and his Irish accent is
unextraordinary and supposedly intended to suggest a
people regarded by Greeks as their inferiors.
It is well designed, plausible and has two superbly
staged battle sequences - the first an agoraphobic
encounter in the desert at Gaugamela, which precedes
the fall of Persia, the second a claustrophobic
fight in an Indian jungle where the Greeks find
themselves confronted by a squadron of elephants,
which anticipates the terror of the first tank
battles of the First World War. The real problem is
that the picture is plodding, unvaried in its pace
and repetitive.
There are too few great moments that lift the
picture into epic status, the sort of things that
make El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Spartacus
and, more recently, Gladiator, so memorable. And at
the end we feel, as with The Aviator, that the
director has become obsessed with a monstrous figure
and has played down a good deal of his brutality and
iniquity. Of the most famous incidents in
Alexander's legend, Stone handles rather well the
young prince's taming of the wild black stallion,
Bucephalus. But he has dropped the cutting of the
Gordian knot, a numinous event that went for
virtually nothing in Richard Burton's hands. At the
end, a major question remains unanswered: is the
film criticising or endorsing American imperialism?
Turtles Can Fly, the first film to be made in
Iraq after the fall of Saddam, is written and
directed by Iranian film-maker Bahman Ghobadi. It
further explores the problems of tough children
attempting to survive in an adult world that he
dealt with in his masterly A Time for Drunken
Horses.
The earlier film concerned Kurdish children engaged
in the dangerous work of smuggling goods back and
forth over the heavily mined Iran-Iraq border. Here,
they're living in a wretched Kurdish refugee camp
near the border between Iraq and Turkey on the eve
of the American invasion of 2003, and the movie is
ominously framed by the suicide of a female teenage
orphan.
The children survive by collecting landmines and
most of them are mutilated. Their leader, nicknamed
Satellite for his ability to install dishes that
enable the community to keep in touch with the news,
is a go-getter who keeps the group together through
a combination of kindness and brutal authority. He's
looking forward to the arrival of the Americans and
a new way of life. You don't need to have seen A
Time for Drunken Horses to know that Satellite's
hopes are going to be dashed - you just need to
watch the news. This is a bold, impressive film that
deserves a wider audience than it's likely to get.
From Australia and North America come two third-rate
horror movies. The low-budget Undead is another of
these derivative spoofs in which mayhem is played
for laughs. George Romero's zombie pictures are its
main source, as are the early New Zealand gore fests
of Peter Jackson, but it's much inferior to the
recent British picture Shaun of the Dead, which
dipped into the same wells.
A storm of alien meteorites descends on the outback
and leads to the zombification of most of the glum
citizens of small fishing community. A couple of
cops, a crazy survivalist and a girl who's been
voted 'Miss Catch of the Day' fight them off with
much decapitation, lopping of limbs and exploding
bodies. It's a crude movie, the special effects
self-consciously charming in their naivety and a
poor example of its kind.
Unlike Undead, White Noise (which I had hoped was
going to be a film version of the Don DeLillo novel
of the same title) has certain pretensions. This
Anglo-Canadian production, directed by British TV
filmmaker Geoffrey Sax, was made in Vancouver but is
clearly set in the States. Following on a stream of
pictures about grieving people getting in touch with
dead relatives (and vice versa), it stars a
lugubrious Michael Keaton as a widower whose
novelist wife has died in mysterious circumstances.
A stranger (Ian McNeice) arrives to tell Keaton that
she's contacted him from 'the other side' and
introduces him to EVP - electronic voice phenomenon
- a way of contacting or being contacted by the dead
through television and radio signals. The filmmakers
assure us that EVP is catching on and has produced
successful results.
The one thing that makes this convincing is that the
recently deceased would be too smart to entrust
their communications to the Post Office.
End of the Century: The Ramones is an interesting
documentary about the innovative New York punk group
who all changed their names to Ramone (including
three successive drummers), stayed together for a
quarter of a century while hating each other, and
became feted without achieving great financial
success. Like most rockumentaries, it ends up
bobbing in the wake of This Is Spinal Tap.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk
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