When You’re Strange: Reviews

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A place to add any reviews of the When You're Strange documentary.

I will start it off with this one from the Observer newspaper here in the UK by Mark Kermode who is the BBC's film correspondent and someone I usually find I agree with.

DVD Review
Despite being a swaggeringly overrated band whose narcissistic frontman was one of the worst rock poets of all time (worse, even, than John Lennon), the Doors have long inspired an unaccountable degree of reverence among the chattering cinematic classes.
Ever since Francis Ford Coppola stuck "The End" over the opening of Apocalypse Now, it's been open season for film-makers who love the leather-trousered image of Jim Morrison and his much-flaunted crown jewels.
From the hyperbole of Oliver Stone's dreary biopic The Doors (tag-line: No one here gets out awake) to the suitably cheap shots of Wayne's World II with its "weird naked Indian", the lizard-king has never been far from our screens.
Rarely, however, has he been so boringly sanctified as in Tom DiCillo's solidly non-mock rock-doc When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors (2009, Universal, E/15), which stretches the bounds of patience rather than perception.
Johnny Depp narrates the admittedly impressive assembly of archive footage in a monotonous drone which balances awe-struck admiration with self-conscious cool in a perfect storm of hyberbolic baloney.
It's a shame because DiCillo (who started out as director of photography on such Jim Jarmusch films as Stranger than Paradise) is a talented film-maker whose previous work has bristled with dry wit.
Remember the sly humour with which DiCillo cast Nick Cave as ridiculous rocker Freak Storm in his debut feature Johnny Suede? Sadly, there's none of that edge in this wallowing hagiography which ironically confirms Morrison's status as less of a shaman than a charlatan. Oh, put it away Jim…
Mark Kermode The Observer, Sunday 12 September 2010

Whilst i agree with the overall thrust of the review as far as the film itself is concerned it shows the damage 30 odd years of Ray Manzaresque type hyperbole has done not just to Morrison but to The Doors.
Jimbo, shamen and Dionysus may well bring in a dollar but they undermine the overall artistic legacy of The Doors.
This kind of evaluation of Jim as a poet and artist from Kermode (who is someone I like to listen to on BBC with regards film) heavily tainted by the sentaionalism of Ray Manzarek and his ilk to give an uninformed impression that is not at all a fair reflection of Jim Morrison as a poet or artist.

Those people who worship at the Temple that is Ray Manzarek should take into account that every time Ray Manzarek speaks Jim Morrison's credibility wanes a tad more.
Ray's voice is heard throughout WYS and the damage done proved by reviews of the film which take the time to use it to attack Morrison.
Yes the man had plenty of flaws but his art can at least stand up and be counted in his favour.
But because of the last 30 years it barely has a chance.
I remember one BBC programme called When Hippies Ruled The World which featured Ray, and Jimbo, shamen and Dionysus, which dismissed Jim as a poet because of the lyrics to Light My Fire.
It's sad that this view prevails and it always will unless Ray Manzarek shuts up and allows other voices (pun intended) to be heard.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

New Doors movie When You're Strange is a revival too far?

The Val Kilmer/Oliver Stone portrayal was built on hype all long, argues John Patterson

The first thing I thought when I heard about When You're Strange, Tom Dicillo's new Johnny Depp-narrated film about Jim Morrison and the Doors, was that it had taken the band a full 20 years to recover from that movie Oliver Stone made about them; you know, the one with Billy Idol in it.
And, oh yeah, Val Kilmer.

When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors
Production year: 2009
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 86 mins
Directors: Tom DiCillo
Cast: Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Johnny Depp, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger

I missed the Doors the first time round, when they probably were pretty magical (the more naive you were in 1967, the more appealingly dangerous they would have seemed; they were born to foment high-school revolution), but I was around for the first big revival, in 1980, not seven years after Morrison, bearded, bloated and blasted, expired aged 27 in his Parisian bathtub.

That summer the Doors' Greatest Hits album, lately unleashed, enjoyed wall-to-wall play on suburban radio stations across America, with LA Woman, Riders on The Storm and Hello, I Love You impressing themselves forever into a playlist sclerotic with Stairway To Heaven and REO Speedwagon singles, and soon enough I was sick of the sight and sound of them.
The success of the revival was goaded along by the bestselling and overwrought biography published that year, No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman.
As Robert Christgau noted at the time (and correctly), the authors promised the reader a dionysian genius and delivered a drunken asshole.

Even a punk-marinated teenager like me could see there wasn't much here to worship: One and a half great early albums, then two more that rank among the most execrable product of the high hippie era, followed by one last great bluesy blowout in the form of the LA Woman album (whose title track will forever remain the national anthem of nighttime Los Angeles).
Then, after the inspiration had dried up on Strange Days, there was a lot of attention-hungry public cock-waving and drunken shenanigans on Jimbo's part (for a 60s icon his intoxicants of choice were strictly 1954 suburbia).
And to this day, I can tell if I'll be friends or not with someone if they can prove to me they're still embarrassed about buying An American Prayer.
If they fail to denounce it in violent and shame-filled terms - no Christmas card.

So the Stone movie, which I remember as hovering on the horizon for years while it was being made, held few charms for me.
It turned out to be the loudest and most annoyingly empty Stone movie to date, although the widely pre-denounced Val Kilmer was actually very good as Morrison (and talk about a perfect temperamental match-up!).
Stone seemed to have bought the Hopkins/Sugarman hype hook line and sinker.

So I thought there was nothing new I could learn about the Doors, until I saw When You're Strange, and found out I was right.
Except for one thing: I got the feeling that if Jim had lived out the filmmaking dreams he nourished at UCLA film school, he might have ended up making movies just as crap as Oliver Stone's.

Better the way it worked out, I think.

John Patterson The Guardian, Saturday 26 June 2010

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Densmore & DiCillo promote WYS



WYS Paris Cinema