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EW review: 'Alexander' still doesn't work

Though DVD is shorter, movie still mediocre

By Ty Burr
Entertainment Weekly

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Ashton Kutcher
Bernie Mac
Colin Farrell
Oliver Stone

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Behold Oliver Stone, the eighth wonder of DVD: a filmmaker who turns out a director's cut of "Alexander" shorter than his original theatrical version.

But while eight minutes have been snipped from the wayward epic, rumors that the Macedonian conqueror would emerge miraculously hetero prove unfounded. Jared Leto's Hephaistion is still here and still making such lambent puppy eyes that you half expect Mel Gibson to barge in and throw him out the window.

No, as Stone himself explains in his painstakingly informative/discursive/batty commentary, the intent was to restructure "Alexander" so that the hero's fraught Greek childhood with battling parents Philip (Val Kilmer) and Olympias (Angelina Jolie) runs more clearly in parallel with his later conquests of Babylon and on and on.

But for all the rejiggering, the film remains stymied by creeping inertia -- it's a rock-star saga like "The Doors," with early brilliance followed by a long, attenuated twilight of sycophants and failed comebacks, and it's hard to deny that Colin Farrell's petulant approach is simply the wrong one.

What entertainment is to be found in "Alexander" is mostly Stone, whether he's waxing defensive in the commentary ("Maybe in another time and place we'll have a fair treatment of eunuchs") or leading his production troops into the fray in disc 2's three-part making-of (compiled by Stone's son Sean) -- a more illuminating look into expertly mounted folly than the film itself.

"Perfect is the enemy of good" was a motto bandied about the set. By that logic, Stone has indeed achieved perfection.

EW Grade: C-

'Guess Who'

Reviewed by Mandi Bierly

This reverse update of 1967's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" -- in which Ashton Kutcher meets the parents of his black fiancee -- is surprisingly high on heart and low on laughs. Which means we'd rather watch daddy Bernie Mac talk to Kutcher or Zoe Saldana (who plays Mac's levelheaded daughter) in "Guess Who" than see those go-kart and lingerie scenes again.

EXTRAS "It's a comedy -- don't get too far from the jokes," director Kevin Rodney Sullivan ("How Stella Got Her Groove Back") says in his commentary. Perhaps he should've taken his own advice. While he's busy detailing intricacies like the lighting and camera work for nearly every shot -- snooze -- we get, literally, only three interesting stories. The best: In real life, Mac actually did climb into bed with one of his daughter's suitors.

The deleted scenes and making-of documentary are equally humorless, even though we're told that Mac launched into an hour-long on-set stand-up routine while the cameras were rolling. (We do get a tease, but this should have been awarded its own special feature.) At least the gag reel includes a slo-mo take of Kutcher and Mac's pillow football game -- the in-it-to-win-it pair's funniest moment.

EW Grade: C+


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