How much do I love David Edelstein? Not that any half-sighted monkey couldn't tell this movie was gonna blow from frame one of the trailer, but Edelstein does the ninja-critic moves on Alexander. I was driving back from the gym when I caught this bit of his review of Oliver Stone's shiny turd on NPR:

Listening to Alexander appeal to his exhausted, irritable army to continue on to the heart of Asia instead of heading back to Babylon or Macedonia, you find yourself fearing not for his men, but for Colin Farrell's vocal cords, which sound as if they're being shredded to a powder. Farrell had a stylish bully-boy presence in Daredevil and in a terrific Irish ensemble movie called Intermission. At his best, he's shrewdly small-scale. You can imagine him firing up the lads at the pub before he gets too stuporous. But all the armies of the Western world? He doesn't begin to have the stature, or the lung power. And those pouffy blond locks don't help. Quite a bit has been written about Stone's inclusion of Alexander's (historically accurate) bisexuality. The point seems to be that Alexander knew no boundaries, that his sexuality was as fluid as his notion of geographical borders. But it's tame stuff: moist looks traded with a eunuch and with Jared Leto, an actor with bright blue eyes who's too self-intoxicated to be much of an erotic force.

Heh heh heh... (Yeah, I'll spend an extra couple of months in purgatory for my inappropriate glee, but it's worth it.)

Edelstein also has a pretty bitchin' quotation for the ages, in this case, about crazy/compelling Angelina Jolie:

I don't care how nuts she is, Jolie is the real deal: a gorgeous, epic-scaled actress who can transform herself from the inside out. She could eat Colin Farrell for breakfast and pick her teeth with Jared Leto. Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great.

Take that, boys.

xxx c