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Oliver Stone has done a great many odd jobs in the film industry, such as being an editor, producer, director of photography, writer and even an actor.

His newest directorial effort, Alexander, opens in theaters nationwide today.

This is the first attempt at a feature length fiction motion picture by Stone since 1999's Any Given Sunday, which, needless to say, did not meet the expectations of many people, including myself.

Stone, throughout the three and a half decades of his career, has been obsessed with biopics. JFK, Nixon, Born on the Fourth of July and The Doors are some of Stone's previous biographical works. When working on biopics, he likes to be involved in every aspect of development, and is very controlling of the work, allowing him to say it is entirely his.

He is a Vietnam veteran and has directed a multitude of films dealing or taking place in the Vietnam War, the only major Hollywood director to do that. In films like Platoon and Heaven and Earth, Stone looks more toward the psychological aspects of the war, instead of the battles and losses people faced.

More recently, he has focused his attention towards military dictatorships, specifically Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. In the mid-80s, Stone touched on this with his film Salvador, but then went on to work on other projects entirely unrelated, such as Wall Street and Talk Radio. He picked back up his dictatorship fascination in both 2004's Looking for Fidel and 2003's Comandante.

When these elements are combined, Alexander appears to be the quintessential Oliver Stone film. That, of course, we will find out today, but his fascination with biographical pictures, dictatorships and the darkness of the human spirit, makes this film something to look forward to.

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