I started to write this over a week ago, but after a few days of retching I put it off, then the amount of bile I initially wrote fried the .doc it was on and now I can't open the file anymore. So I have to start over from scratch, and that just ticks me off even more! Thus, I apologize for a quick, painful review. In short, Alexander is the Atlanta Hawks of film: terrible and thankfully few people are going to watch.

In the narrator role as an old pal of Alexander, Ptolemy, Anthony Hopkins weeps that Alexander's "failures were greater than most others' successes." The same, however, cannot be said for Oliver Stone and his epic. His failure in Alexander is more failing than most others' failures, more than even George Lucas and Howard the Duck, which seems like a masterpiece of storytelling in comparison.

	This is too a good movie! You're a big poopie head!

It's not that Alexander is bad, it's that it's REALLY bad. The acting is bad, the story flows badly, the music neither fits nor arouses, the accents are spoken horrifyingly badly, the scenery looks bad, the action is confusingly bad, the dialogue is both written and spoken badly, and after three hours my butt hurt, bad. Not even Rosario Dawson's ample boobage could save this travesty of filmmaking.

Stone would most likely ignore me, anyway. Since I'm a Red State American, I'm supposed to rail that Alexander is an abomination before God, and yadda yadda yadda I do only what Jerry Falwell commands.

Horsehockey. I don't care if Alexander was bisexual. It's 325 B.C., after all, so no doubt Greece was swinging. I found it hilarious as Stone tried to turn the movie into a gay passion play, as if Alexander sacrificed himself on the alter of all that is good and loving between himself and his lands and his best pal Hephaistion (Jared Leto).

It's not just Alex's best pal. Alexander features thirty men with pretty long hair staring with doe eyes at each other for three hours. And they do have fabulous hair, more so for Colin Farrell, which is only fair seeing as how he's pretty much a god on earth as the intellectual conqueror. Which, I think Stone thinks is okay. After all, President Bush is a moron so when he liberates the Middle East it doesn't count.

Again I object. Colin Farrell couldn't inspire a seven-year-old boy to play in the rain, let alone convince me he could lead a vast army to overwhelm unknown lands. Our Irish hero does look like he could, however, braid his troops' hair. I would not say this about, say, Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson, because they might kick my a**. Farrell would, um, not kick it. That's all I'm saying.

The way Stone advances the story doesn't make much sense, either. He completely skips past his father's death and straight to a major battle with the Persians, nixing how Alexander consolidated his power in Greece, which is a major step to miss.

For some reason, Angelina Jolie plays Farrell's mother, even though in real life she's only a year older. She looks the same when Alexander is three and when he's twenty, and by this time their relationship is C-R-E-E-P-Y. The phrase "Oedipus complex" comes to mind.

One piece of advice I can give Stone is to sell the movie to Bravo for its cable run. It's a natural fit, and can easily mix with other programming. I can see it now, "Alexander's Manhunt: The Search for America's Most Gorgeous Greek Male," coming right after a rerun of "The West Wing" where evil Republicans do evil things evilly. Following the movie, "Queer Eye for the Macedonian Guy."

I know. That's bad.