Posted on 11/29/2004 5:00:45 AM PST by SolutionsOnly
More moviegoers used the Thanksgiving weekend to catch up with the hits "National Treasure" and "The Incredibles" than to see the year's two biggest holiday-theme flicks or the new epic "Alexander." "National Treasure," in which Nicolas Cage follows a centuries-old legend to a mother lode of historical riches, finished in first place by earning an estimated $33.1 million from Friday to yesterday.
Pixar Animation's "The Incredibles," the bemused tale of superheroes put out to pasture in suburbia, took second with an estimated $24.1 million.
The weekend's two new movies, "Christmas With the Kranks" and Oliver Stone's "Alexander," both settled into the middle of the pack.
"Kranks," a much-hyped film starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple that tries to skip Christmas, overcame terrible reviews to finish third with $22.7 million.
"Alexander," which stars Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great and cost $155 million to produce, earned a disappointing $13.5 million to finish sixth.
The other major holiday-theme film, "The Polar Express," which stars Tom Hanks in a heartwarming Christmas adventure done with high-tech animation, earned an estimated $20.1 million. That brings its total to $82.2 million, less than half of what it cost to produce.
Much happier were the producers of "SpongeBob SquarePants," the animated sponge who made his reputation on Nickelodeon and has earned $58.6 million at the movie box office. He finished fifth this week with $19.6 million.
Yeah, that one blew me away too. Talk about prophesy!
It's quite all right. I probably just overreacted (Those darn pg hormones get me everytime, lol). So I hereby tender my apologies as well.
No, no no! LOL, I wasn't offended by what I didn't understand. I was simply rubbed the wrong way by what the other poster was trying to say...I misunderstood his statmments, that is all.
I appreciate the explanation. I didn't know that that prophecy referred to Alexander...guess I've never been properly "churched", lol. Most of my experiences with church growing up were pretty unsettling to me. I always believed in God, but never felt comfortable with organized religion (thinking all churches were the same as the ones I went to as a child) until after I had children of my own. I have a lot of catching up to do, obviously. LOL
Thanks again.
I hope "Kinsey" tanks.
Did you see Alexander, though? I hear a lot of criticism from people who didn't. Personally, I didn't see much of a political agenda, although when Alexander was describing to his generals how the Persians "needed" Greek "enlightenment," because they were suffering under one barbaric tyrant after another, I did wonder if there wasn't a comment about Iraq injected in there. But it wasn't negative at all: Alexander is clearly the hero in this film.
In this movie, Alexander's army of 40,000 or so Macedonians attack and rout 250,000 Persians by attempting to divide the Persian lines and directly attack and kill the Persian's king, Darius. The Macedonians do manage to drive a wedge through the Persian lines, but Darius escapes.
Later Alexander comments that while Darius is in hiding, he still poses a threat, because the Persians "still believe in him." That had a little whiff of Osama on the loose, even while most likely dead still being used as a propaganda vehice to prop up jihadi sentiment.
I don't know that these elements were introduced deliberately - sometimes the history of these Middle Eastern wars tends to repeat over the centuries because the people and the geography tend to not change that much.
It's a movie you have to bring something to - like an already-established knowledge of the history and peoples of the time. Personally, I found it good entertainment and visually breathtaking, especially the scenes from the (eventually doomed) Library of Alexandria, and the stunning entry of the Macedonian troops into Babylon.
http://www.grecoreport.com/debunking_the_myth_of_homosexuality_in_ancient_greece.htm
Revisionist history is not selling which is heartening. Stone and the studio suits probably thought all PR is good PR.
This article is being waaaaaay too kind. This will forever be stone's "gay" movie. IOW box office poison. (heck anyone even holding the DVD is suspect.)
Actually stone rejected the historic assistance of Greeks because the historic evidence was not supporting his "vision" for Alexander.
http://www.grecoreport.com/debunking_the_myth_of_homosexuality_in_ancient_greece.htm
homosexuality in ancient greece is an myth created by present day homoadvocates.
Re: Alexander being "gay." He was *not,* at least not in the sense that gay activists use the term.
Men in the Greek-speaking world (Sparta, Greece, Macedonia, the islands, etc.) had very close friendships with other men their own age. These friendships were *not* supposed to be sexual (that was reserved for pre-adolescent or early adolescent boys), but sometimes they were. As long as you married the "right" woman from the "right" family and raised up sons to carry on the family name, any other kind of relationship with one's wife was unimportant. Women in Greek society were basically locked up in the women's rooms (the "gynaceum"), and any friendship or companionship between men and women was reserved for the "heteraie" (the high-class mistresses of wealthy men.)
Alexander is shown having a very close lifelong friendship with another man his own age, the general Hephaistion. It is NOT clear in the movie that they have an explicitly sexual relationship, but they do have a very emotionally deep and committed one. This again was NOT unusual for the age.
Also, Alexander, like many powerful kings of his age, had concubines both male and female. In the film, one of those concubines (a Persian eunuch named Bagoas) is shown. This has nothing to do with a "gay agenda" - it's *history.*
Finally, Alexander is shown falling in love with and marrying the Bactrian tribal princess Roxana, which infuriates his generals. Marrying for love was *not* something a man in Alexander's position, especially, was supposed to do. The generals want him to marry a Macedonian princess and raise a Macedonian heir. (Later, in the history, Roxana's son by Alexander is murdered, probably by Macedonians who didn't want him to take the throne.) All of this again is historically consistent - if not in all the details, certainly in the sense of how things were done at that time.
I did not see the movie 'Alexander' based on the historian Victor Davis Hanson's review. This after having seen the History Channel's mutli-hour documentary on Alexander (which did great job on the Alexander/Darius rivalry).
http://victorhanson.com/
You think the Numbers send a message to hollywood? Please, numbers mean nothing to leftists.... they'll take it to mean that the red staters are just rubes like they always believed and that they won't go see Alexander, not because its a piece of trash but because the rubes in the red states are just too stupid to appreciate any movie that doesn't involve things blowing up or has animation... So its not their fault for producing crap, its that the buying public is too red to understand their artistic cinamatic fecal matter.
Dollars mean more to leftists than our outraged emails do.
Incredibles is worth seeing several times. It moves so quickly and there are a lot of hidden goodies that one would see on subsequent viewings.
A reality check to hollyweird revisionism. The last one is particularly interesting given the lurkers who have tried to use Plutarc as justification for misinformation.
=begin snip=
Such fuzzy-minded huckstering is especially prominent among the professors in the Humanities departments of the colleges and universities of the Western World. The frenzy-to-conform exhibited by these homunculi -- whose shoes don't touch the floor when they are seated in their academic chairs -- is such that they are willing to sell their souls, betray their racial heritage (those who are White), and pollute the quality of their scholarship by playing an active role in the promulgation of this historical mythmaking. And it is here, in these departments, where the most infuriating lie of all -- that which posits the prevalence of homosexuality in ancient Greece -- was born. This myth, engendered in Academia, and "legitimized" by an alien and hostile element in America -- an element that controls the awesome mind-molding power of the media and Hollywood -- could not help but "have legs." And so it has come to pass that even an Al Sharpton -- a man with the intellect of a retarded Neanderthal -- could publicly refer to the ancient Greeks as "a bunch of fairies" in a speech given before an audience of his mentally challenged acolytes. "Mentally challenged" because instead of hissing and booing at such patronizingly obvious demagoguery, they cheered, clapped, whistled, and hooted with bug-eyed delight at hearing Whitey traduced and ridiculed by one of their own.
=snip=
We learn as well that "Athens had the strictest laws pertaining to homosexuality of any democracy that has ever existed" (62). In non-democratic Sparta, as well as in democratic Crete and the rest of democratic Hellas, there were similar prohibitions with similar punishments as that meted out in Athens, and Georgiades gives us citations galore to prove his main thesis: "At no time, and in no place, was this practice considered normal behavior, or those engaged in it allowed to go unpunished" (passim). In order to remove any doubt whatsoever, he draws on such ancient luminaries as Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Diodorus Seculus, Euripides, Homer, Lysias, Plato, Plutarch and Xenophon, all of whom have left a written record as to what the prevailing norms were concerning this behavior. He also covers Greek vase painting, Mythology and Lesbianism, while not neglecting to reveal the truth about such much-maligned personalities from Hellas' glorious past as Achilles and Patroclus, Alcibiades and Socrates, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, and the woman that the later Greeks regarded as "the greatest of the lyric poets," Sappho.
Greek vase painting has been a favorite source for the distorters of Greek culture and civilization. Georgiades points out that, of the tens of thousands of vases unearthed so far (the count for just the province of Attica, where Athens is located, is over 80,000), only 30 or so have an overtly homosexual theme; representing, in other words, just .01% of the total (127). When one compares this small percentage to what we see today on TV, in ads, books, magazines, the cinema, etc., one can just imagine what future generations will think of us. There is more, much more, but the purpose of this review is to stimulate the reader to order the book to see for himself just how Georgiades has managed to shed the light of truth on this important aspect of Greek history.
There is one more thing, however, that must be said. Georgiades has -- in a clear and easy-to-comprehend manner -- delineated the difference between what the ancients meant when they used the words "Erastis" and "Eromenos," and the way these words are translated and used in our time. This alone is worth the price of the book. Briefly, to the ancient Greeks, the term Erastis denoted a man who mentored, in a non-physical way, an Eromenos. The Eromenos was in all cases a beardless youth who looked up to and respected his mentor, and who had been commissioned by the boy's parents to take on the vital chore of preparing him to assume the roles of husband, father, soldier, and active citizen in the affairs of his community. Georgiades delves deeply into this relationship, and explains how and why these terms have come today to be confused with the "dominant" and "passive" partners in an homosexual union.
=snip=
Such a person, from the age of Homer -- if he were "gay" in today's sense of the word --was called kinaithos (KIN ay thos), which means "causer of shame" in both modern and ancient Greek (aftós/aftí poú eíinai ó kinón tín Aidó). The word has etymological connections to "shame," "corruption," "disgrace" (Aidó/Aísxos), and literally means "he who brings about the curse of Aídó (a minor goddess who punished moral transgressors and was a companion of the goddess, Nemesis). In Athens, and most other Greek city-states, he would not be allowed to take part in public affairs, and if he were blatant in his behavior (that is, behavior such as that characterized by homosexuals today), would be disenfranchised, exiled, or executed by the state.
What must be kept in mind is that the ancient Greeks were perpetually at war, either with foreign (barbarian) or with Greek foes. War in those days was brutal and final. There were no M.A.S.H. units just behind the field of battle, ready to give life-saving first-aid. No helicopters to take the wounded to hospital. If one were captured, there were no Geneva Conventions to ensure the proper treatment of prisoners because there were no prisoners: All combatants were slain, their women, children, and non-combatants sold into slavery, taken as booty, or slaughtered as well. Such war-like societies must, perforce, develop a warrior code in order to survive. This meant that there was a premium on manhood and all that that word implied. Think of Achilles who, when given the choice of a long life with no glory, chose a short life with glory and honor instead. Think of Sparta and her "wall of men," of Leonidas and his 300, or of their Spartan mothers who said to their sons as they left for war: "Either come back with your shield, or on it." Think of Socrates who chose to die rather than bring dishonor upon himself by disobeying the laws of his beloved city: a city he had fought for with honor in many a battle. Think of Alexander the Great at Opis, in Persia, and of his famous speech to his men when he offered to strip in order to match his wounds with theirs, all of which were on his chest and none on his back. Such states could not afford the luxury of the kind of weak, effeminate men we see all around us today. The glory that was Greece was only possible because strong men were willing to fight and die so that their country could survive and their philosophers and poets could flourish. Before there could be a Parthenon there had to be a Marathon (Xoris Marathones then ginounte Parthenones).
http://www.grecoreport.com/debunking_the_myth_of_homosexuality_in_ancient_greece.htm
[W]hen ... the governor of the coast-lands of Asia Minor wrote to Alexander that
there was in Ionia a youth, the like of whom for bloom and beauty did not exist, and
inquired in his letter whether he should send the boy on to him, Alexander wrote
bitterly in reply, "Vilest of men, what deed of this sort have you ever been privy to
in my past that now you would flatter me with the offer of such pleasures?" (On The
Fortune of Alexander, 333 a - b.)
http://www.grecoreport.com/citations_pertaining_to_homosexuality.htm
In the preface (p. xiii) of his book titled Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, Dr. Thornton, a professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno, states in no uncertain terms that the Greeks "were horrified and disgusted by the idea of a male being anally penetrated by another male, and called such behavior 'against nature.' "
http://www.grecoreport.com/citations_pertaining_to_homosexuality.htm
I agree there is that which is inappropriate to legitimate historical debate. However there are references and citations independent of the review writer which can be divorced from the inappropriate editorial commentary.
My women's Bible Study just finished a series of lessons on the Book of Daniel. We went into the prophecies dealing with the scriptures posted above. It was obvious to my study group that God revealed to Daniel and the King the specific rise of Alexander's empire and future kingdoms that would rise and then fall. Facinating.
I was just about to mention that from this report. While there were some things I could agree with, as I linked to further articles within "The Greco Report" I almost thought I was reading portions from the Elders of Zion. They see a Jewish conspiracy everywhere...including Colin Powell because he speaks some Yiddish.
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