Change Your Image
saumacus
Reviews
An American Rhapsody (2001)
Huh?
One of the opening scenes of this film, where Soviet soldiers harass a young Hungarian woman in a restaurant and shoot her father for an attempt to protect her, is totally false. It has probably been made that way for a benefit of an average American moviegoer, who would easy understand a bar brawl scene, but set in in Eastern Europe few years after the Second World War ended ... One has to understand the restrictions the occupying Soviet Army's solders were under: Were they allowed to go to a restaurant? (No, they wouldn't.) Would they have money to pay even if they were able to go? (Same answer.) Would they have loaded weapons on them to shoot anyone there? (Absolutely not.) The whole episode (spell it c-l-i-c-h-é) belongs to a bad Western movie.
Alexander (2004)
Will they in Hollywood ever do their homework?
It's a miserable failure.
If Mr. Stone, as he himself has said it, was interested in Alexander's life, why not study it? We know comparatively more about Alexander than almost any other ancient historical figure; there are numerous monographs and even good fiction works about the Macedonian available ... why not just read it, or at least ask for a good digest? Didn't Mr. Stone have enough money to pay a couple of university professors? They could at least have pointed to him how hoplites' shields looked like in a phalanx ...
May be it would be better if Mel Gibson was director: HIS Alexander would at least have tried to speak Greek ...