Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Mar 6, 2010 10:19:06 GMT
Went to see the London premiere with my mates Mark HolySha, Simon and Bad Cowboy these were my thoughts.
When You’re Strange: London Premiere on Friday 16th October 2009.
When You’re Strange is a film made by Tom DiCillo with the full co-operation of The Doors and access to the bands archive. The title reflects what the music of The Doors meant to people back in the 60s and 70s. It was a strange direction to follow being a Doors fan back then. I know from personal experience growing up as a Doors fan in the UK just how disliked this band was by mainstream rock fans. Something about The Doors just rubbed normal rock fans up the wrong way. I could never see it as I was hooked but I was looked upon as strange for being so heavily into Doors during my teens and early twenties. So the title does indeed resonate within me as a fan but can the film live up to the title and do justice to the very strangeness that over 40 years later still resounds to this day.
For me the film needs to be looked at in four stages.
ONE the film footage, TWO the narration by Johnny Depp, THREE the narrative itself Depp has to work with and FOUR the context of the last few years hype generated by The Doors with regard this film being some kind of definitive answer to Oliver Stone.
Unfortunately it falls down pretty much on all levels and was a major disappointment to this Doors fan considering the hype since the 90s that people like Manzarek have been feeding that this would somehow be an answer to the Evil Oliver Stone movie. Which by the way I enjoy immensely. Why was this. The film should have been perfect. It had all the advantages other documentaries did not. Was it a case of too many cooks? Was it a case of the Myth being too strong to ever tell the real story. Was it ego was it motivated by the drive for profit. At the end of the day I don’t know those answers all I can do is reflect my thoughts based on the last 40 years of existence of a Doors fan on this film. You may read what I write and say I judge the film too harshly or take it too seriously. But I do take The Doors seriously. They were a serious band were they not. I happen to take rock music very seriously. It’s not background music to me. And the Doors are not just another band to me. I grew up with The Doors and because of that I look at things Doors perhaps with a keener eye than many do. An emotional eye perhaps but neither fanatical nor zealous simply honest and affectionate. So lets get on with it.
Tom DiCillo boasted on his blog that the difference between his film and Stone’s is that HE puts an emphasis on Robby Krieger writing Light My Fire rather than Morrison as if this is some kind of talisman that separates the PURE from the unbelieving but conveniently ignores the fact that Stone himself produced a scene in HIS movie making that very point very forcefully.
For me the difference between Tom and Oliver’s movies are that Olly has an excuse that he was making a profit driven Hollywood movie for a non Doors audience whilst Tom was making in effect The Doors own documentary with total cooperation and access to basically anything he needed to tell THE DOORS story.
So what’s your excuse Tom for making such a dog’s breakfast?
Let’s look at the footage first. Some pretty cool stuff there seen in damn good quality but I got a cold feeling when the film started with ‘The 60’s started with a shot’ and we moved into Granada TV territory with footage of civil rights marches and silly hippies playing with daffodils. Granada too had an excuse as they just thought The Doors some anti capitalist bunch of hippies who wrote songs about the earth dying and the war in Vietnam and saw a chance to bash America. Once again Tom what’s your excuse for such an obvious error?
We moved along to a milieu of the out-takes from Morrison’s rather dull ego trip HWY which whilst a must own for Doors fans is pretty boring but still great to see this footage so I am not knocking that at all. Interspersed with bits from Doors concert movie Feast Of Friends and out takes from the same as well as some really incredible never before seen snippets of concert footage from the US. I for one have no idea what they were and I have pretty much all the available to fans footage.
The best moments footage wise was the Singer Bowl segment and overall I did enjoy the actual film in that respect even if it seemed uneven the way it was edited.
But that is probably the fault of the lack of Doors footage, especially from the early days, than the film-maker who for me did a good job presenting the visual side of the film.
OK lets move onto Depp’s narration. Personally I am a JD fan and was glad he signed on to narrate but I was a bit disappointed as I thought he would have brought something more than he did to the film. Apparently he is a Doors fan but I thought that his narration was bit passionless for a subject that I myself believe to be a lot more important musically than a great many others do. Henry Rollins narrated a VH1 documentary back in the 90s and did a much better job which quite surprised me as I seriously did expect a lot more from someone of his quality. Overall. Glad JD was there but he was a tad trite and pedestrian in his delivery.
So not great so far but as I said on Tom’s blog ‘The Devil Will Be In The Detail’ and the whole thing will stand or fall by the narrative. And sadly this is where the whole thing falls apart big-style. For one thing and the most major gripe I have with the narrative is that we NEVER get any sort of feel for the UNIQUENESS of The Doors who for me were the most important band America have ever produced and have never been equaled in any way shape or form since though many have tried. True I am biased as these guys have been my fave band for nigh on 40 years. But the film just comes across as just another American band with a singer who got drunk a lot and was a bit of a nutbag who suffered from the delusion he was some kind of Poet.
And as far as some kind of answer to Stone’s overblown but fun biopic it seemed to me as if Tom just used Olly’s storyboard for his documentary. The Doors meet then go live in a beach hut. Suddenly and for no apparent reason they get a gig in The London Fog. Little or no mention is made of the elements that went into the band before they got a real gig. And the period of 1965 and 1966 is responsible for pretty much all of those very elements that define The Doors as such an inimitable example of the best that rock music can bring. Then they played the Whisky got fired and Morrison got arrested and died in Paris.
That’s probably a little bit unfair to Tom I admit but I never once really sensed anything important about this band and if I did not know better would have thought the same about them as many did after seeing the Stone effort in 1991.Random facts are thrown at us throughout the movie but are never expanded upon or explained in any interesting way.
One example was the London Fog. We were told Ronnie Haran suddenly appeared and got them the Whisky gig but were not told the reason why Ronnie was there and the level of interest she was showing in The Doors or why. The bands very important and defining three-month sojourn at The Whisky was condensed into one night where Morrison got stoned off his tits and played the Oedipal End resulting in the band being fired on the spot. Which is a highly debatable point as the management of the club claim a different story to what The Doors tell. It seemed to me as if there was the usual headlong rush towards Miami and the sexy bit where we could all get into the nitty gritty of The Doors and gawk at their loonie knob flashing lead singer. And gawk we did as a substantial section was devoted to the whole sorry episode as Morrison was displayed in all his glory. Of course the Living Theatre as usual was portrayed as the instigators and no attempt to look anew at the background of Miami and factor in the relationship Morrison had with the other Doors. We got a hint of that with the snippet that Ray talked Jim into giving it 6 more months at one stage but the party line was well and truly towed with Miami which I personally feel had its roots a lot nearer home.
Throughout the film never did we get a sense of the dark, poetical, doom laden, DRAMA of The Doors that was brilliantly described as ‘Artaud Rock’ by Bill Kirby in 1967. The Doors themselves were born out of a poem by William Blake. Not the ‘Marriage Of Heaven & Hell’ as immediately springs to mind with its ‘doors of perception’ stanza but more from his ‘Auguries of Innocence’ the two stanzas below sum up The Doors perfectly.
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
“Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.”
They were not just another hippy-trippy good time surfing pop band. These guys were more Armageddon than peace and love. A dramatic and cataclysmic conflict of musical form, poetry and uneasiness that took the listener places they could never imagine when listening to The Beatles or The Jefferson Airplane. The Doors were surely born to their own endless night. Truly a ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ for the ear rather than the eye but as deeply dark and disturbing as anything Antonin Artaud imagined.
But never in the 90 minutes did I feel that I was watching a band that reflected this. There was no real inkling of how really different this band was and how irrelevant ‘Light My Fire’ was to the band as the chilling ‘End Of the Night’ and anguish of ‘You’re Lost Little Girl’ will tell you more about this band than the BIG HIT ever will.
Compare this with the first attempt to document The Doors from the pen of Mike Jahn in 1969. Mike’s book reads like a paperback thriller intermingling his chapters seamlessly with an introduction of the characters and their history and his own experience of the band at The Fillmore East in March of 1968. The Doors finest live gigs according to those there around band at the time. Mike’s narrative cleverly captures the darkness of The Doors via the terrifying power of The End on stage and their poetic majesty from the bands rendition of Celebration Of The Lizard but it is his final page turning conclusion that makes sense of The Doors as drama rather than pop as the tension between them is revealed in a short vignette that would have graced any good thriller. During ‘Light My Fire’ a dark figure stalks each member of The Doors with nothing more innocuous than a handful of daffodils thrown on the stage by some fans. The climatic final scene as the drummer’s space is invaded by the singer armed with his flowers culminating in a smashing crescendo as the drummer tries to smash the offending flowers and with them the invaders fingers. The incursion repelled the figure stalks off back to his mark and hits it just in time for the songs climax and that chilling scream. Tom’s documentary had none of that dread and dramatic tension and Johnny might as well have been describing washing powder instead of the most powerful band of the 60s. Nothing here to really scare Mum and Dad America. Nothing to send a shiver down your spine or make the hairs on your neck stand up. The Doors music does that in spades and their story should reflect that. Even Stones movie contained a passion for the subject regardless of the perceived and actual inaccuracies.
As far as the facts presented went Tom plays as fast and loose with events as Olly did and even just made stuff up to look cool. Which was fine for Olly but not for Tom. Couple of examples. The very important (compared to the more media exciting Miami gig) New Haven concert which was glossed over contained the ‘fact’ that Jim Morrison after being maced walked on stage and immediately attacked the police culminating in him being arrested. When in actuality it was about the fifth song ‘When The Music’s Over’ when he cleverly wove his ‘Little Blue Man’ rap into the lyrics and it was over as they were not at all pleased and arrested him. Another example is that after LA Woman was recorded The Doors wanted to release Riders On The Storm as a single but label boss Jac Holzman got them to go for the radio friendly Love Her Madly instead. Sounds cool to a new fan but it was well documented over the last couple of decades that the band favoured the Changeling not Riders and Jac persuaded them to release LHM as he thought it the obvious hit. No biggies true but I for one expected better research than this.
Another gripe concerns the reaction from a certain keyboard player who spent the last 18 years attacking Stone for his Doors film that concentrated on Morrison and presented the other 3 Doors as bit part players. Could not see much difference here myself Ray? Jim the drunken crazy person was well in evidence with just a cursory nod to Jim the Poet which Stone indeed paid homage to from the first moments of his film. This was hardly a film about The Doors as it said on the poster and more another film about Morrison. We are Doors fans and we know that Morrison had an addiction to alcohol and took lots of drugs as well but the drunken stoned Morrison of this film was not the whole story and Oliver Stone paid for his crime with two decades of abuse from Ray Manzarek and his sycophants but Tom will likely get away with it because Manzarek was involved totally in this mess so consequently will shut his mouth this time round. Jim Morrison was not always drunk or stoned and that Jim hardly makes an appearance. There is no exploration of the song writing process which for The Doors was pivotal to what they became. The dark fusion of poetry, film, drama, jazz and myth making the band utterly unique at a time of peace, love The Beatles and The Monkees was a revolution during the so-called summer of love. But all I got was the feeling I was watching some stuff about just another west coast band. Could have been a documentary on It’s A Beautiful Day if I did not know better.
Another annoying thing. The feeling I got after 90 minutes was that all The Doors misfortunes stemmed from Jim’s crazy antics and the other 3 got off pretty much scot free which for me I found unforgivable. Jim may well have been an alcoholic from pretty much the start but he was a true artist and he was not the one who wanted to sell the band to a car company. The film never explored the relationships within the band to any degree. It never explored the final days when Morrison quit the band before going to Paris and the band was so terrified he would nick the name and restart The Doors in Europe that they presented him with a contract amendment to negate any attempt from him to restart The Doors in Europe. Something that became central to the 21st century Doors name drama 30 years later.
According to their then manager they were even seeking a new singer in the form of Mike Stull from Canadian band The Wackers possibly even before Morrison announced he was leaving. This distrust between the band in 1971 an important factor, never even looked at during the documentary, which even spilled over into 1972 when after travelling 5000 and being 2 mile from his grave at least 2 of The Doors (and probably the 3rd) never even paid any respects to the man who would make them millions a year for decades. But Jimbo the drunk and Jim the acid head were there for all to see.
As to the hype surrounding the documentary. No one on Earth has manipulated Jim Morrison more for profit than Ray Manzarek whose revisionist Doors History is taken as the definitive viewpoint when in fact it is nothing more than manipulative opportunism and this film utterly reeks of him.
As far as an answer to Oliver Stone is concerned the film is a joke. But as a Doors documentary it is pretty decent and I would recommend it to any Doors fan from that standpoint as a must see regardless of its many faults. But sadly it was presented as a lot more than that and for that reason disappointed me very much. MTV said the same as Tom but took a hour less to do it. And considering the access and the time taken to complete the project this Doors fan expected a lot better than he got.
So basically is the film any good? I would argue it is nothing remotely special as it was sold to be but nonetheless essential viewing for a Doors fan. Is it worth a wider release? Probably, though I cannot see it appealing to non Doors fans the way Stone’s movie did. A friend of mine commented after the film that Tom had just spent a weekend reading ‘No One Here Get’s Out Alive’ and this was the result. I think that was a very fair comment from a Doors fan. No better or for that matter worse than the documentaries of 1968 or 1981 or the MTV/VH1 efforts in the 90s. A sort of Doors Greatest Hits Movie never delving too far beneath the superficial veneer but covering all the obvious bases.
Basically ‘The Idiots Guide To The Doors’ or ‘Doors For Dummies’. But not what it said on the tin I am afraid.
It has by all accounts picked up a UK distributor though I suspect this will see a very limited release schedule in small cinema’s but if it comes to Stockton I would go and see it again and hopefully a decent job will be made of a DVD unlike the usual poor no thought at all Doors high priced rip of DVD efforts.
We shall see!
Alex Patton October 2009
When You’re Strange: London Premiere on Friday 16th October 2009.
When You’re Strange is a film made by Tom DiCillo with the full co-operation of The Doors and access to the bands archive. The title reflects what the music of The Doors meant to people back in the 60s and 70s. It was a strange direction to follow being a Doors fan back then. I know from personal experience growing up as a Doors fan in the UK just how disliked this band was by mainstream rock fans. Something about The Doors just rubbed normal rock fans up the wrong way. I could never see it as I was hooked but I was looked upon as strange for being so heavily into Doors during my teens and early twenties. So the title does indeed resonate within me as a fan but can the film live up to the title and do justice to the very strangeness that over 40 years later still resounds to this day.
For me the film needs to be looked at in four stages.
ONE the film footage, TWO the narration by Johnny Depp, THREE the narrative itself Depp has to work with and FOUR the context of the last few years hype generated by The Doors with regard this film being some kind of definitive answer to Oliver Stone.
Unfortunately it falls down pretty much on all levels and was a major disappointment to this Doors fan considering the hype since the 90s that people like Manzarek have been feeding that this would somehow be an answer to the Evil Oliver Stone movie. Which by the way I enjoy immensely. Why was this. The film should have been perfect. It had all the advantages other documentaries did not. Was it a case of too many cooks? Was it a case of the Myth being too strong to ever tell the real story. Was it ego was it motivated by the drive for profit. At the end of the day I don’t know those answers all I can do is reflect my thoughts based on the last 40 years of existence of a Doors fan on this film. You may read what I write and say I judge the film too harshly or take it too seriously. But I do take The Doors seriously. They were a serious band were they not. I happen to take rock music very seriously. It’s not background music to me. And the Doors are not just another band to me. I grew up with The Doors and because of that I look at things Doors perhaps with a keener eye than many do. An emotional eye perhaps but neither fanatical nor zealous simply honest and affectionate. So lets get on with it.
Tom DiCillo boasted on his blog that the difference between his film and Stone’s is that HE puts an emphasis on Robby Krieger writing Light My Fire rather than Morrison as if this is some kind of talisman that separates the PURE from the unbelieving but conveniently ignores the fact that Stone himself produced a scene in HIS movie making that very point very forcefully.
For me the difference between Tom and Oliver’s movies are that Olly has an excuse that he was making a profit driven Hollywood movie for a non Doors audience whilst Tom was making in effect The Doors own documentary with total cooperation and access to basically anything he needed to tell THE DOORS story.
So what’s your excuse Tom for making such a dog’s breakfast?
Let’s look at the footage first. Some pretty cool stuff there seen in damn good quality but I got a cold feeling when the film started with ‘The 60’s started with a shot’ and we moved into Granada TV territory with footage of civil rights marches and silly hippies playing with daffodils. Granada too had an excuse as they just thought The Doors some anti capitalist bunch of hippies who wrote songs about the earth dying and the war in Vietnam and saw a chance to bash America. Once again Tom what’s your excuse for such an obvious error?
We moved along to a milieu of the out-takes from Morrison’s rather dull ego trip HWY which whilst a must own for Doors fans is pretty boring but still great to see this footage so I am not knocking that at all. Interspersed with bits from Doors concert movie Feast Of Friends and out takes from the same as well as some really incredible never before seen snippets of concert footage from the US. I for one have no idea what they were and I have pretty much all the available to fans footage.
The best moments footage wise was the Singer Bowl segment and overall I did enjoy the actual film in that respect even if it seemed uneven the way it was edited.
But that is probably the fault of the lack of Doors footage, especially from the early days, than the film-maker who for me did a good job presenting the visual side of the film.
OK lets move onto Depp’s narration. Personally I am a JD fan and was glad he signed on to narrate but I was a bit disappointed as I thought he would have brought something more than he did to the film. Apparently he is a Doors fan but I thought that his narration was bit passionless for a subject that I myself believe to be a lot more important musically than a great many others do. Henry Rollins narrated a VH1 documentary back in the 90s and did a much better job which quite surprised me as I seriously did expect a lot more from someone of his quality. Overall. Glad JD was there but he was a tad trite and pedestrian in his delivery.
So not great so far but as I said on Tom’s blog ‘The Devil Will Be In The Detail’ and the whole thing will stand or fall by the narrative. And sadly this is where the whole thing falls apart big-style. For one thing and the most major gripe I have with the narrative is that we NEVER get any sort of feel for the UNIQUENESS of The Doors who for me were the most important band America have ever produced and have never been equaled in any way shape or form since though many have tried. True I am biased as these guys have been my fave band for nigh on 40 years. But the film just comes across as just another American band with a singer who got drunk a lot and was a bit of a nutbag who suffered from the delusion he was some kind of Poet.
And as far as some kind of answer to Stone’s overblown but fun biopic it seemed to me as if Tom just used Olly’s storyboard for his documentary. The Doors meet then go live in a beach hut. Suddenly and for no apparent reason they get a gig in The London Fog. Little or no mention is made of the elements that went into the band before they got a real gig. And the period of 1965 and 1966 is responsible for pretty much all of those very elements that define The Doors as such an inimitable example of the best that rock music can bring. Then they played the Whisky got fired and Morrison got arrested and died in Paris.
That’s probably a little bit unfair to Tom I admit but I never once really sensed anything important about this band and if I did not know better would have thought the same about them as many did after seeing the Stone effort in 1991.Random facts are thrown at us throughout the movie but are never expanded upon or explained in any interesting way.
One example was the London Fog. We were told Ronnie Haran suddenly appeared and got them the Whisky gig but were not told the reason why Ronnie was there and the level of interest she was showing in The Doors or why. The bands very important and defining three-month sojourn at The Whisky was condensed into one night where Morrison got stoned off his tits and played the Oedipal End resulting in the band being fired on the spot. Which is a highly debatable point as the management of the club claim a different story to what The Doors tell. It seemed to me as if there was the usual headlong rush towards Miami and the sexy bit where we could all get into the nitty gritty of The Doors and gawk at their loonie knob flashing lead singer. And gawk we did as a substantial section was devoted to the whole sorry episode as Morrison was displayed in all his glory. Of course the Living Theatre as usual was portrayed as the instigators and no attempt to look anew at the background of Miami and factor in the relationship Morrison had with the other Doors. We got a hint of that with the snippet that Ray talked Jim into giving it 6 more months at one stage but the party line was well and truly towed with Miami which I personally feel had its roots a lot nearer home.
Throughout the film never did we get a sense of the dark, poetical, doom laden, DRAMA of The Doors that was brilliantly described as ‘Artaud Rock’ by Bill Kirby in 1967. The Doors themselves were born out of a poem by William Blake. Not the ‘Marriage Of Heaven & Hell’ as immediately springs to mind with its ‘doors of perception’ stanza but more from his ‘Auguries of Innocence’ the two stanzas below sum up The Doors perfectly.
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
“Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.”
They were not just another hippy-trippy good time surfing pop band. These guys were more Armageddon than peace and love. A dramatic and cataclysmic conflict of musical form, poetry and uneasiness that took the listener places they could never imagine when listening to The Beatles or The Jefferson Airplane. The Doors were surely born to their own endless night. Truly a ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ for the ear rather than the eye but as deeply dark and disturbing as anything Antonin Artaud imagined.
But never in the 90 minutes did I feel that I was watching a band that reflected this. There was no real inkling of how really different this band was and how irrelevant ‘Light My Fire’ was to the band as the chilling ‘End Of the Night’ and anguish of ‘You’re Lost Little Girl’ will tell you more about this band than the BIG HIT ever will.
Compare this with the first attempt to document The Doors from the pen of Mike Jahn in 1969. Mike’s book reads like a paperback thriller intermingling his chapters seamlessly with an introduction of the characters and their history and his own experience of the band at The Fillmore East in March of 1968. The Doors finest live gigs according to those there around band at the time. Mike’s narrative cleverly captures the darkness of The Doors via the terrifying power of The End on stage and their poetic majesty from the bands rendition of Celebration Of The Lizard but it is his final page turning conclusion that makes sense of The Doors as drama rather than pop as the tension between them is revealed in a short vignette that would have graced any good thriller. During ‘Light My Fire’ a dark figure stalks each member of The Doors with nothing more innocuous than a handful of daffodils thrown on the stage by some fans. The climatic final scene as the drummer’s space is invaded by the singer armed with his flowers culminating in a smashing crescendo as the drummer tries to smash the offending flowers and with them the invaders fingers. The incursion repelled the figure stalks off back to his mark and hits it just in time for the songs climax and that chilling scream. Tom’s documentary had none of that dread and dramatic tension and Johnny might as well have been describing washing powder instead of the most powerful band of the 60s. Nothing here to really scare Mum and Dad America. Nothing to send a shiver down your spine or make the hairs on your neck stand up. The Doors music does that in spades and their story should reflect that. Even Stones movie contained a passion for the subject regardless of the perceived and actual inaccuracies.
As far as the facts presented went Tom plays as fast and loose with events as Olly did and even just made stuff up to look cool. Which was fine for Olly but not for Tom. Couple of examples. The very important (compared to the more media exciting Miami gig) New Haven concert which was glossed over contained the ‘fact’ that Jim Morrison after being maced walked on stage and immediately attacked the police culminating in him being arrested. When in actuality it was about the fifth song ‘When The Music’s Over’ when he cleverly wove his ‘Little Blue Man’ rap into the lyrics and it was over as they were not at all pleased and arrested him. Another example is that after LA Woman was recorded The Doors wanted to release Riders On The Storm as a single but label boss Jac Holzman got them to go for the radio friendly Love Her Madly instead. Sounds cool to a new fan but it was well documented over the last couple of decades that the band favoured the Changeling not Riders and Jac persuaded them to release LHM as he thought it the obvious hit. No biggies true but I for one expected better research than this.
Another gripe concerns the reaction from a certain keyboard player who spent the last 18 years attacking Stone for his Doors film that concentrated on Morrison and presented the other 3 Doors as bit part players. Could not see much difference here myself Ray? Jim the drunken crazy person was well in evidence with just a cursory nod to Jim the Poet which Stone indeed paid homage to from the first moments of his film. This was hardly a film about The Doors as it said on the poster and more another film about Morrison. We are Doors fans and we know that Morrison had an addiction to alcohol and took lots of drugs as well but the drunken stoned Morrison of this film was not the whole story and Oliver Stone paid for his crime with two decades of abuse from Ray Manzarek and his sycophants but Tom will likely get away with it because Manzarek was involved totally in this mess so consequently will shut his mouth this time round. Jim Morrison was not always drunk or stoned and that Jim hardly makes an appearance. There is no exploration of the song writing process which for The Doors was pivotal to what they became. The dark fusion of poetry, film, drama, jazz and myth making the band utterly unique at a time of peace, love The Beatles and The Monkees was a revolution during the so-called summer of love. But all I got was the feeling I was watching some stuff about just another west coast band. Could have been a documentary on It’s A Beautiful Day if I did not know better.
Another annoying thing. The feeling I got after 90 minutes was that all The Doors misfortunes stemmed from Jim’s crazy antics and the other 3 got off pretty much scot free which for me I found unforgivable. Jim may well have been an alcoholic from pretty much the start but he was a true artist and he was not the one who wanted to sell the band to a car company. The film never explored the relationships within the band to any degree. It never explored the final days when Morrison quit the band before going to Paris and the band was so terrified he would nick the name and restart The Doors in Europe that they presented him with a contract amendment to negate any attempt from him to restart The Doors in Europe. Something that became central to the 21st century Doors name drama 30 years later.
According to their then manager they were even seeking a new singer in the form of Mike Stull from Canadian band The Wackers possibly even before Morrison announced he was leaving. This distrust between the band in 1971 an important factor, never even looked at during the documentary, which even spilled over into 1972 when after travelling 5000 and being 2 mile from his grave at least 2 of The Doors (and probably the 3rd) never even paid any respects to the man who would make them millions a year for decades. But Jimbo the drunk and Jim the acid head were there for all to see.
As to the hype surrounding the documentary. No one on Earth has manipulated Jim Morrison more for profit than Ray Manzarek whose revisionist Doors History is taken as the definitive viewpoint when in fact it is nothing more than manipulative opportunism and this film utterly reeks of him.
As far as an answer to Oliver Stone is concerned the film is a joke. But as a Doors documentary it is pretty decent and I would recommend it to any Doors fan from that standpoint as a must see regardless of its many faults. But sadly it was presented as a lot more than that and for that reason disappointed me very much. MTV said the same as Tom but took a hour less to do it. And considering the access and the time taken to complete the project this Doors fan expected a lot better than he got.
So basically is the film any good? I would argue it is nothing remotely special as it was sold to be but nonetheless essential viewing for a Doors fan. Is it worth a wider release? Probably, though I cannot see it appealing to non Doors fans the way Stone’s movie did. A friend of mine commented after the film that Tom had just spent a weekend reading ‘No One Here Get’s Out Alive’ and this was the result. I think that was a very fair comment from a Doors fan. No better or for that matter worse than the documentaries of 1968 or 1981 or the MTV/VH1 efforts in the 90s. A sort of Doors Greatest Hits Movie never delving too far beneath the superficial veneer but covering all the obvious bases.
Basically ‘The Idiots Guide To The Doors’ or ‘Doors For Dummies’. But not what it said on the tin I am afraid.
It has by all accounts picked up a UK distributor though I suspect this will see a very limited release schedule in small cinema’s but if it comes to Stockton I would go and see it again and hopefully a decent job will be made of a DVD unlike the usual poor no thought at all Doors high priced rip of DVD efforts.
We shall see!
Alex Patton October 2009