And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

We've all heard this quote. I'm pretty sure I've even paraphrased it on this show.

Would you be surprised to know?

While it is a pretty well documented historical fact

that Alexander sat down and had a cry when he'd conquered everything he could. This precise

wording, the wording that I considered to be definitive, originated in the mouth of Hans

Gruber, the bad guy from Die Hard? I just found that out. My mind is

fucking blown. History man, right? I kind of think Hans Gruber was

cherry-picking a moment from history to make his own point about the present, which in his case was a

he was pulling during the Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza.

That moment where Alexander cries isn't really in this movie, although it purports to tell us through Ptolemy's recollection

about the life and death of Alexander the Great, a real precocious young Macedonian

who rampaged around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and parts of India in the mid-300s,

B.C. You sort of wonder if that moment served as some kind of impetus for Oliver Stone,

the film's director, who in the early 2000s, was still a fairly well thought of director.

I mean he had a reputation for grinding his weird political acts but he had done a number of big

budget movies with mainstream success and a a couple of smaller, more artsy movies that people liked.

This movie seems to thumb its nose at the big tent pole blockbuster style of this new era of filmmaking, opting instead to model itself structurally on the movie palace epics of the past.

But this is not a movie that would have been made in the 40s or 50s.

One of Stone's preoccupations in telling this story is to show us how different sexual mores were in the ancient past.

At the time in 2004, the civil rights movement surrounding the LGBT coup community was building a head of steam in opposition to the Bible-thumping creeps

in the George W Bush White House. So instead of being the kind of man that traditional

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