From Yahoo:

LONDON (AFP) - Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone blamed "raging fundamentalism in morality" for the frosty reception that his new film "Alexander" is getting in his native United States.

In London for its British premiere, Stone, 58, said that after a career full of cage-rattling work, he thought a biopic of Alexander the Great, the 4th century Macedonian-born conquerer, would be "a safe subject".

But he said he was "quite taken aback by the controversy and fierceness of the reviews" which greeted its US release, including outrage at the film's suggestion that Alexander was bisexual.

"Sexuality is a large issue in America right now, but it isn't so much in other countries," he said.

"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 south because the media was using the words: 'Alex is Gay'."

"Alexander" stars Colin Farrell and Angelina Jolie, both seen at the London premiere, but its US box office take so far has been less than a quarter of the 150 million dollars that it cost to make.




It had nothing to do with fact that it wasn't a good movie?

14% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I guess things like boring, confused, emotionally uninvolving, overacting, and doing a poor job of telling the history of Alexander, and a really bad hairdo have nothing to do with why people didn't like this movie?

Sure Oli, keep telling yourself that. Your film was ambitious, but it still sucked.

The film was just fundamentally bad.

Okay, Stone. Wink. Wink.

Never mind pretty boy Farrell with bleach blond hair uttering laughable taglines in the trailer. Psst.. Stone... I think you need to take it up with the marketing boys, not wage a war on Americans.

I think that excuse has already been taken by the makers of Alfie.

C'mon Oliver.

(whew) and here I thought Stone didnt have a sense of humor...

Fundamentally badly written, fundamentally boring .... nice to have an excuse for bad movie-making, though.

Has the movie opened anywhere else yet overseas? If so, I'd like to see the box office numbers to see if they compare to us homophobe Americans.

Fixed.

Stone is one paranoid MFer, isn't he?

Opens in Japan this month.I don't see that much of a crowd for this boring movie.

Wow, this guy has quite a set on him. I'm not taking anything from Stone, he's a great director, but I think he has spent too much time surrounded by "Yes men".

"Of course it's a great movie, Mr. Stone, it's the audiences fault."

Hey, I posted this in an ALFIE thread. They're were blaming ALFIE's flop at the box office on the very same thing.

They said "no one wanted to see a man sleeping around and acting immoral" Yeah right!!! and that this was because of the Nation's "swing towards conservative morality". Hey the porn biz is doin' just fine. so you can't blame it on any bullshit "conservative swings".


Some people just can't take responsibility for their fuck ups.

While we'll never really know if the US would have taken to a "good" Alexander film, Oliver Stone is clearly in a great state of denial.

Forgetting the fact that the film had woefully little actually "conquering", Angelina Jolie's ridiculous performance, every excruciating Anthony Hopkins scene, mind-boggling time leaps and countless other problems, if he wants to boil his film down to people rejecting the gay aspect, Stone is clearly to blame.

Not only does he spend entirely too much of the film on the relationships of Alexander (to no dramatic avail), with very little about how he came to power or his numerious victories, but the character Alexander's lover played by Jared Leto is so poorly written that most of his role is staring at Colin Farrell with puppy dog eyes. You don't ever really know Leto's character, so their love and tragic end have no impact whatsoever.

I hang out with a fairly left-wing set of friends (as I am, myself), and we all thought the movie sucked (although the battles were good!)

What countries is he talking about, besides Europe and maybe Australia? I don't even know where to put Africa. Last I heard Muslim countries had very strong feelings about sexuality.

OH PLEASE!!

I think Mr. Stone avoids the biggest blame for the movie's flop in the USA: himself.

Americans got tired of JFK's tinfoil hat conspiratorial tone and Natural Born Killers' glorification of violence. Small wonder why people don't want to see movies made by Oliver Stone nowadays.

I am hardly a "fundamentalist" but I have no interest in seeing this film. Not because of religious or moral reasons, but because it just doesn't look good.

WTF?

Everyone I talked to said it looked boring and even the possibility of Rosario Dawson's boobs was not enough for them not to wait for the DVD.

Oh, man ... the next 10 years are going to be a blast. Continuing the tradition of not taking responsibility for your own actions, everything that doesn't go someone's way is going to be blamed on those damned conservatives or those damned liberals. Red state, blue state. Blue state, red state. Yay.

While I just love the implication that regions of the country are idealogically homogeneous, he does have a point here. I live in the South, and I didn't read the reviews. Granted, my reasoning -- the previews made it appear to be a bloated self-important mess -- is different from his assumption, but at least he got the first part right.

das

One reason I wasn't interested in seeing it was because I didn't want to be "preached" to by Stone for 2-3 hours. It looked kind preachey, from the trailer, but I could have been projecting feelings onto it from other Stone productions. I've felt "preached" to after most of his movies. Some I have agreed with his message and some I haven't, but it does take some work to get myself to watch.

Its ok Oliver.... we will forgive you for this........

Weren't there a bunch of lawyers in Greece who were all up in arms about suing Stone over Alexander being portrayed as a bisexual? I actually haven't heard any mention of it outside of that. Frankly, I had even forgotten about that until I read this article.

Riiiiiiiight


Off topic a bit here, but I want to say as a Democrat and a liberal one at that that Mr. Stone does not represent an accurate image of us.