I Sat Through That? #22 - Alexander (2004)

In which Gerry Hayes looks at Alexander The Great and thinks, ‘the hair proves it.’

Alexander, 2004.

Directed by Oliver Stone.
Starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson and tons more.
Written by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis.

Christ, another epic. Stone gives us the story of Alexander, the little, blond Irish bloke who conquered the world while wearing a funny helmet that made him look like that Martian from the Looney Tunes cartoons.

Farrell plays the eponymous hero. As is usual for our Col, he can’t really rid himself of his Irish accent and rewriting his character to explain this by his having an Irish father - or some such nonsense - wasn’t really an option in a historical biopic. Stone attempts to get around this by distracting the audience with the aforementioned stupid, blond head and ridiculous helmet.

He needn’t have bothered really, as he obviously missed the fact that everyone else in this film speaks in their own accents too. Against the general mish-mash of confusion that is Alexander, this multi-cultural aspect adds another layer of disarray.

Lets see. Alexander is heir to the kingdom of Macedonia. His dad is a cyclops (Kilmer) and his mum (Jolie) is a mentalist, sex-pot with some weird paraphilia for snakes. To her credit, at least Jolie doesn’t speak with her own accent in the film. Instead, she borrows hers from the Count in Sesame Street. “There is one Alexander. One! Ahh ha ha ha ha!”

Alexander has his own sexual hang-ups. He might be in love with his best friend, Hephaistion (Leto) who is - gasp - a man. Either Stone or the studio plays it safe though and all the audience really sees are longing, lingering glances between the two whereas, Alexander’s tryst with Rosario Dawson has boobies and everything.

Right. Have we got everything then... Alexander loves a bloke, and the eunuchs, and his mum (everybody loves their mum). Despite this, he gets married to Dawson and has wild sex. He loves his dad but his dad doesn’t love him. And he’s a bit short, with silly hair. All the ingredients for a nutter then.

And, as you might expect, he goes off conquering the world to prove to his dad that he’s all man.

Or something... Oliver Stone wrote this so there’s probably a bundle of contemporary parallels and deeper meanings related to machiavellian, political machinations and how war is an easy-sell in a culture, subservient to an avaricious ruling elite, that's been made compliant by enforced consumerism and the bias of a controlling media. I’m not sure - I was distracted by the hair.

Anyway, given that Alexander did actually conquer most of the known world, there are the inevitable battle scenes. And for the most part, these are pretty impressive. The ‘literal’ bird’s-eye view didn’t really work for me but it served its purpose. Personally, I could have done with more battles and less lingering looks or Count Chocula impressions but, I admit, I’d probably have been complaining about ‘dumbing down’ then and bemoaning the lack of anything more cerebral. There’s no pleasing me.

Well, there is, but Alexander isn’t the film to do it. If you know nothing of Alexander The Great, you won’t really come away with much more knowledge that you had at the beginning (despite Hopkin’s narration making it feel like a history lesson). This would be ok if the film accomplished something - anything - else but it doesn’t. It’s a few battle scenes and three hours of Irish accents and sub-Freudian confusion.

Good hair, though.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #21 - The Transporter (2002)

In which Gerry Hayes considers Rule One: Anything where Statham’s driving...

The Transporter, 2002.

Directed by Corey Yuen.
Starring Jason Statham, Qi Shu, Matt Schulze.
Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.

You know, I almost don’t want to include The Transporter in this series. Oh there’s no doubt that it’s drivel but the thing is, it doesn’t really pretend to be anything else. It’s brainless entertainment with no other purpose or pretences. It’s essentially just a bunch of coloured lights and noises designed to keep people gawping for an hour and a half instead of going out, getting pissed and picking a fight with someone smaller. The Transporter isn’t trying to be high-brow or to ‘say something’. It’s not trying to ‘work on a number of levels’ (it barely has one) and, for all of these reasons, I’m a little reluctant to include it here.

That said, I saw it recently and, my god, it’s rubbish.

Jason Statham (now pretty much typecast as ‘that bloke who drives stuff’) plays Frank Martin, an ex-special forces hard man, retired to the south of France. There, he makes ends meet by driving stuff about. He’s essentially a sort of taxi cum courier service but with added hardness.

He has a BMW of which he’s geekily proud. He’s even installed a fake looking keypad to immobilise the car and make sure fares can’t shoot him and drive off. He’s no-muss-no-fuss and he’s the coolest guy ever to don a pair of driving gloves.

Everything’s going swimmingly until Frank gets hired by a bad guy called Wall Street (Schulze). You can tell immediately he’s a bad guy as he’s all cocky and mental. If you met him in real life, you’d say “well, this bloke has a job for me but he looks a bit like the sort who would double-cross me and probably try to kill me in some cruel, inventive manner - I might pass”.

Mr. Street gives Frank a ‘package’ to deliver. Frank pops off happily with the package in the boot/trunk (I’m catering to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic there - did you notice?).

Frank’s curiosity, however, gets the better of him and he breaks his own, self-imposed rule about not looking in the package and he looks in the package. Inside he finds a girl, Lai (Qi Shu). It’s about here that the stupidest thing you have ever seen happens. Not just the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen in a film but the stupidest thing you’ve seen anywhere, ever:

Lai tells Frank she needs to visit the little girl’s room. Frank, who earlier in the film, didn’t mind bank-robber brains all over his car, gets all squeamish at the thought of a bit of girl-pee in it and lets her wander off into the woods, far out of sight, to do her filthy business. A lesser man might worry that she would take the opportunity to run off. Frank, however, has the benefit of his Special Forces training which has thought him that draping the end of a long rope, loosely, about his prisoner’s shoulders will allow her to wander two hundred feet into the woods, out of sight, with little or no hope of escape.

I won’t spoil things by telling how this - seemingly flawless - plan worked out.

The film goes on in a pretty similar vein. Something ridiculous happens and then there’s a big fight. Something moronic happens and then there’s lots of shooting and rockets. Something imbecilic happens and then there’s...

...An intensely homo-erotic, oil-fight between loads of bad-guys and a bare-chested, greased-up Jason Statham. Yep, Statham - with the big guns out - gets himself all lubed-up and squelches and squirms about the floor of a bus garage with a dozen other men.

As you might expect, once he's despatched the oiled men, Statham saves the day in a manly, big-bicepsed sort of way and sits back and waits for the call about the sequel.

Personally, I’m quite looking forward to Italian Death Transporter Job IV.

Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes

I Sat Through That? #20 - Six Minutes of Runaway Bride

In which Gerry Hayes falls in love with Roberts and Gere all over again, just like it says on the poster...

Runaway Bride, 1999.

Directed by Garry Marshall.
Starring Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Joan Cusack, probably others - I didn’t really see.
Written by Josaan McGibbon and Sara Parriott.

You read that title correctly. After whinging and bellyaching, last week, about Peter Jackson stealing (I don’t use that word lightly) hours, days, weeks of my life with his interminable pish, this week’s I Sat Through That? concerns approximately six minutes of a film. During the week, while flicking up and down the channels desperately trying to find something, anything, worth watching, I had the good fortune to land on the dénouement of Runaway Bride. I say “good fortune” because, within the time it took my finger to cease it’s unrelenting, channel-hopping presses, I knew that I had this week’s column all sorted out.

I watched about six minutes of Runaway Bride.

That was enough - much more than enough - to make it worthy of my complaining about sitting through it (and don’t get all smartarsed, saying “oh, but you could have turned it off” - nobody likes a smartarse - take it from me).

I had a quick look on the net to research it - I’m nothing if not diligent - and by an extraordinary measure of good luck, I found the end of Runaway Bride on YouTube. You can look at it here or on the player below. Honestly, I’m not making this up - this is almost exactly where I came in.

Obviously, if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to see - or hear about - the last six minutes because you really, really hope to see it in the future, you should probably go away. Not because I’m worried about spoiling it for you - you should just go away.

I came in as Roberts and Gere were having one of those ‘serious conversations’ out on the most fake-looking balcony I’ve ever seen. Honestly, there are school productions of Romeo and Juliet with more convincing balconies and there are daytime soap-operas made with a budget less than the cost of a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich that have more realistic and natural lighting.

So Roberts (who should never wear a turtle-neck - her head and neck appear to be all part of the same long, weird protrusion), gives Gere a stinking pair of running shoes. ‘Cos she’s the runaway bride. Get it. It’s symbolic n’ stuff. At least I think it is - I missed the start you see.

Then she proposes in a sickening, candied, Hollywood manner (listen to where the violins come in on “I guarantee we’ll have tough times”). He puts on some mellow jazz on his (of course) retro sound system like a giant, grey-haired cliché and they dance.

Nauseating, right?

Right. But I could have forgiven it (just), if not for what followed. An achingly awful wedding scene on top of a frickin’ hill with autumn leaves all around. Please. Stomach-churning.

But wait. They’re not done making me sick. The music reaches a crescendo and... What’s that? Why, it’s all their friends running up the hill towards them, clapping and cheering as they come. There goes that delicious Thai curry I had for dinner.

As they ride off on horses (maybe it makes sense if you’ve seen the rest of the film), Joan Cusack, signals the end credits by screaming annoyingly into a phone and a montage of execrable, cringeworthy scenes of staggering odiousness follows...

Gape, dumbstruck, at a choir spontaneously bursting into a chorus of Hallelujahs as they hear the news. Wonder at the baker-woman throwing flour in the air and marching inanely. Rub your eyes to make sure you’ve really seen the priest and nuns running joyously across a field. Cower, repeating “no, no, they wouldn’t...” as you watch the quirky granny running/knitting because you know - you just know - they’ll have her turn and follow that hunky looking bloke. Wish, wish harder than you’ve ever wished, that you could be close enough to that bloke with the guitar to punch him in the conk.

Six minutes.

More traumatic and damaging than anything Peter Jackson has done. Peter, all is forgiven - I’ll even go and watch your two-and-a-half day director’s cut of The Hobbit when it’s out.

Six minutes of Runaway Bride...


Read more I Sat Through That? right here.

Gerry Hayes is a garret-dwelling writer subsisting on tea, beer and Flame-Grilled Steak flavour McCoy’s crisps. You can read about other stuff he doesn't like on his blog at http://stareintospace.com or you can have easy, bite-sized bits of him at http://twitter.com/gerryhayes