Closer

Closer is a complete mess. There's nothing so clever about the contrived plot, the characters are abhorrently inconsistent and histrionic, and the transitions are as abrupt as they are unexpected, not to mention the emotions are all wrong. Characters burst into heartrending tears or fall madly in love or give up hopes they so dear at overly dramatized moments that even the most forgiving part of me had a hard time suspending my disbelief. The writer and the director choked the plot with all that have already been said or mused about relationships in an attempt to philosophize sex and love, but they're no philosophers, much less observant persons (heard that it's actually a play-turned-movie, but it is all the same). It's as if they tore pages out of a bunch of pulp romances and stitched them back together on the silver screen. It's such a sore sight!

I know people who cheat in their relationships, some even enjoy playing heartbreakers and all, but they are saints in comparison with the characters in Closer! Their dispositions and actions are just so over-the-top and unbelievable. Some may say the director is shooting for "realism" or "the brutality of truth" or whatever high-sounding gibberish one cares to conjure up, but at the end of the day, Closer's nothing more than a lousy soap opera about four miserable souls: A prick who cares only about sex, a loser who, coincidentally, cares only about sex, a fake who leads multiple lives with a penchant for drama, and a confused who acts now and regrets later. The stereotyping of the two sexes is unrelenting: Men crave sex more than anything and women are victims in general. Dan said, towards the end of the movie, that "without truth, we're animals". But god forbidden, show me a decent human being here! Closer should be renamed as "National Geographic Present: The Mating Urge of Unscrupulous Homo Sapiens", in which nothing gets in the way of a good fuck, not even love.

Performance wise, the cast does bring a lot to the table and is the only saving grace of this piece of highbrow garbage. Clive Owen, shedding his silly Arthurian armor, is definitely in his element playing Larry the misanthropic, manipulative and hotheaded jerk. Natalie Portman brings to her character the complexity required and then some, despite the half-hearted pole dance. Julia Roberts delivers Anna's subdued emotions of a self-victimized woman with incredible restraint and precision that it's almost like music. Jude Law plays Dan, the most uninteresting character in the mix, and thus comes off flat and forgettable (the last time he did a good job is in a brilliant sci-fi called Gattaca, which apparently nobody cares to see). Closer does remind me of one thing: If we admit people fall in love by pure chance (like Dan and Alice, and Anna and Larry in the movie), then whether a relationship can last or not is also a matter of chance or probability. In other words, you can't do much about your relationship. How sad.

Oliver Stone's Alexander

Is Stone's Alexander as pathetic as many said so? I think not. For one, he scores rather high on historical accuracy. There're alternations that I think he does it purposefully and are well within artistic license (e.g. Darius III's family was captured in the battle of Issus not Gaugamela; Alexander got his arrow wound when laying siege to an Indian town not from the battle with prince Porus; and he returned to Babylon not because of his wound but a mutiny, etc.). Stone also pepperes the actual events with interesting titbits of legends, such as the Persian Queen mistaken Hephaestian as Alexander, which touch up the characters nicely. And of course, the battle scenes are breathtaking to say the least. Watching the phalanxes in action is such a thrill! They make all the sword buckling in Troy (one of the worst in 2004) look like child's play. Peterson is no match for Stone-no two ways about it!

What I think are some of the bummers include Stone's fixation on Alexander's "sexuality" (this is in fact not the right word to use, as people in the antiquity didn't look at sex the same way we do today) when it doesn't have a lot to do with how Alexander has come to be. Stone's reasoning for the less than enthusiastic reception to the picture is that people are taken aback by the "homosexual" undertone, but he forgets he's the one who plays it up! The tiring Freudian interpretation of Alexander's insatiable appetite for conquests and battles (yeah, mother again), and the perplexing choices of leaving out some of the important exploits in the early career of Alexander as a conqueror (particularly the atrocity he committed in Thebes and the battle of Issus when he let Darius flee and thus set the stage for Gaugamela) also leave the audience cold. The biggest blunder has to be his shyness in forming an opinion about Alexander when we really expect one from him. Stone does make up his mind on some whodunnit mysteries, such as who killed King Philip and was Alexander poisoned by his Companions, but they're not what we expect from someone who's famous for his propensity to take side on more important issues, such as how Alexander should be remembered. Stone's adviser Robin Lane Fox describes a Homeric hero in his book, but under Stone's lens, Collin Ferral's too busy exchanging seductive glances with Jared Leto that Alexander looks more like a gigolo than hero. Ptolemy's final comments about how great and flawed a person Alexander was is downright cliché and stupid!

Stone does his best in painting a picture of Alexander, a towering historical figure so complex that historians still have a lot to debate and study, and that is truly admirable. Anyone with a passing interest in Alexander should go see it. Stones stretches our attention too thin sometimes with a plethora of Greek names and geographical locations that no sane person can pronounce, least of all work out their relations; nevertheless, it's still good education if you have the patience. You may very well leave the theatre feeling more cultured. Don't get me started on how Alexander will turn out if it falls on the hands of lengend-butchers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and gangs. Why can't people just cut Stone some slack? This is more than a passable job. The Chinese title of the picture defies Stone's intention to tell the story of a person rather than a king, especially when Alexander isn't all that much of a king.