Post by tzinana on Jul 21, 2005 5:15:30 GMT
"Flying, Falling: Days of the Doors"
By JANET MASLIN
The New York Times
March 1, 1991
IN the 60's, for anyone who took the Doors half as
seriously as the Doors took themselves, wide-screen
musical biography was strictly for the Trapp family.
It would have been unimaginable that some day movie
audiences would relive the moment when the guitarist
Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) pulled a scrap of paper
out of his pocket and showed it to the singer Jim
Morrison (Val Kilmer) and the two other Doors, saying
shyly, "I came up with somethin' . . . I call it
'Light My Fire.' "
Unimaginable, perhaps -- but here it is anyway: "The
Doors," Oliver Stone's clamorous, reverential,
much-larger-than-life portrait of the 60's most
self-important rock band. Incendiary even by Mr.
Stone's high standards, "The Doors" presents the
group's career as a brave, visionary rise followed by
a wretched slide into darkness, a slide implemented by
drugs, alcohol, madness, world affairs and the demands
of fame. This view is sure to arouse as strong a
love-hate reaction as the Doors did themselves, but
two things are certain: Mr. Stone retains his ability
to grab an audience by the throat and sustain that
hold for hours, without interruption. And he has
succeeded in raising the dead.
Nowhere did the best and worst of the 60's collide as
messily as they did in Jim Morrison, the Doors'
resident sex symbol and bete noire. "It was Morrison
who wrote most of the Doors' lyrics, the peculiar
character of which was to reflect either an ambiguous
paranoia or a quite unambiguous insistence upon the
love-death as the ultimate high," wrote Joan Didion in
her essay "The White Album," when the Doors were still
at their peak. She also described Morrison's slow,
studied way of holding a lighted match to his black
leather lap.
Morrison's self-destructiveness, which led to
personally dangerous and professionally suicidal
outbursts, was accompanied by a similarly violent
streak aimed at others. In the wrong mood, he was
capable of waving a knife at a friend, dragging a
companion out onto a window ledge, locking a lover in
a closet and then setting the door on fire, or aiming
a microphone stand at an audience, javelin-style. "Why
are you doing this to me?" his girlfriend Pamela (Meg
Ryan) wails during one fight depicted in the movie.
"Because you're in the room," Jim casually replies.
But along with this mean streak ("When I want some
good pagan carnage, I put on the Doors," John Milius
once said), and with the drug and alcohol use that
greatly exacerbated it, came the heady idealism that
accounts for part of the Doors' surprisingly
long-lived popularity. (Another big factor is
Morrison's untimely death, at the age of 27 in 1971,
which turned his alienation, heartthrob looks and
taboo-busting behavior into the makings of an updated
James Dean-Elvis Presley-Lenny Bruce composite.) At
his most darkly ecstatic, Morrison could invoke the
liberating influences of mind-expanding drugs and
literature, calling for his audience to throw off any
and all life-denying constraints.
That call is heeded enthusiastically by Mr. Stone, who
after "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" was
already knee-deep in the 60's, and who now embraces
the Morrison mystique hook, line and sinker. This
wildly avid approach to his subject makes for some
dismaying moments, especially in the film's most
adulatory early stages. ("You wrote this? You got
more?" asks the incredulous organist Ray Manzarek upon
first hearing one of Morrison's songs.) But it is
also, for the director, a source of strong and
unmistakable passion. And one of the things Mr. Stone
does most intoxicatingly is to set forth his
enthusiasms in terms any audience will understand.
"The Doors" begins dangerously, with a startling but
unclear prologue (it is later understood that as a boy
Jim felt the soul of an Indian shaman entering his
consciousness) and with unbridled excitement about the
college-boy intellectual fervor that brought forth
this band. In the film's opening episodes, Jim is seen
courting Pam under a glorious night sky with poetry
and existential small talk ("I feel most alive
experiencing death, confronting pain") and wowing the
impressionable Ray, a fellow student at U.C.L.A. Film
School.
"It's great! It's nonlinear! It's poetry! It's
everything good art stands for!" Ray exclaims after
watching Jim's student film featuring Jim, a leggy
blonde, a television set and images of Nazi Germany.
Mr. Stone, in a goatee, is seen as the pedantic film
professor in this scene, saying, "Eh, pretty
pretentious there, Jim . . . not easy to follow." That
attitude would have been welcome in other parts of the
story, but it is largely absent, which in Mr. Stone's
work is unusual. The best of his other films display
much more critical distance from their subjects than
there is here.
Mr. Stone's other work -- especially his films about
the disorienting effects of wartime experience -- has
also packed more of a psychedelic wallop than "The
Doors" does, despite the fact that psychedelia is an
explicit ingredient this time. The Doors' early drug
trips, especially during one long peyote-dream
sequence in the desert, are fluidly and elaborately
staged. Yet they are also almost redundant, so fully
does the drug culture of the 60's permeate this film
in every frame. Using inventive optical effects,
American Indian imagery, swooping camerawork, odd
angles and the dizzying motion of 30,000 extras (all
told, through the film's various crowd scenes and
concert re-enactments), "The Doors" creates a constant
buzz of lulling, mind-bending confusion. Recaptured
with startling accuracy, it is the perfect visual
backdrop for the Doors' rise and fall.
Prodigious research has gone into this film's minutiae
(like the "Band From Venice" banner that accompanies
the group's first club date on Sunset Strip), and even
into its slightly fabricated episodes. (There was
never a television "Light My Fire" car commercial,
over which Morrison becomes infuriated in the film,
but in fact his three bandmates did agree to sell the
song.) But nowhere is this attention to detail more
astonishing than in Mr. Kilmer's performance, which is
so right it goes well beyond the uncanny. Leading
dauntingly with his chin, projecting sexy insolence,
never losing sight of the singer's magnetism, Mr.
Kilmer captures all of Morrison's reckless,
insinuating appeal. "He liked to find out what the
personal frontiers of the people around him were," the
Doors' producer Paul Rothchild once said
euphemistically, and Mr. Kilmer perfectly captures
that kind of abrasive daring.
Musically, too, Mr. Kilmer is unerringly good. If
anything, he sounds even more like Morrison when
singing a cappella, which he does in a couple of
scenes, than when his extremely serviceable new vocal
renditions are integrated into pre-existing Doors
recordings. Even when lip-synching expertly to the
many Doors songs that are used here, Mr. Kilmer makes
himself utterly convincing. Jim Morrison could sound
grittier and more dangerous than this, and his stage
manner was sometimes more eerily deadpan, but Mr.
Kilmer expertly re-creates the essential Morrison
performance style.
Mr. Kilmer's Jim Morrison is as comfortable
demonstrating his restlessness on a small scale --
stepping in front of a car on Sunset Strip, jumping
boisterously onto the hood and kicking at the driver
-- as he is reigning over the huge concert scenes that
are the film's most ambitious moments. The staging of
these latter scenes courts the ridiculous (Mr. Stone
insists on bringing the dancing Indian shaman in Jim's
mind right onto the stage with him). But it is
shockingly evocative, too. The druggy haze, the fans'
ecstatic dancing, the road crew's expert intervention
with groupies rushing the stage, the hail of flowers
and joints thrown at the musicians, the band's utter
panic over what its lead singer may choose to do next:
all this chaos is re-created with frightening
intensity, and with a compellingly tortured view of
Morrison as both orchestrator and pawn of the surging
crowd.
Some of the film's more intimate moments are just as
weirdly potent, like the Thanksgiving scene chez
Morrison involving acid trips, a knife fight, a
showdown between Jim's two rival girlfriends (Kathleen
Quinlan is especially effective as the avowed witch in
the group), and a duck dinner that gets stomped to
bits in the process. The final stage of Morrison's
life was never easy.
Also re-created here, with remarkable care: scenes on
film stock faded to a 20-year-old orange hue,
reworking real images of the Doors arriving at an
airport and jokingly explaining themselves to an
interviewer; Jim's deliberate, gleeful flouting of the
rules of "The Ed Sullivan Show" (Mr. Kilmer does this
even better than the real Morrison did), and the
scary, sodden performance in Miami that put an end to
Morrison's concert career. The panic of the other
Doors as this last event unfolds (Kevin Dillon is
especially good as the angry, uncertain drummer John
Densmore) provides a striking backdrop for the sad
spectacle of Morrison's dissipation. Mr. Densmore, in
his memoir about the band, writes of beginning to feel
that Morrison was "headed straight for a sad death in
a gutter."
What ruined Jim Morrison? The film, at times, dares to
make the outrageous suggestion that he died for his
audience's sins, but it is possible to be haunted by
"The Doors" without subscribing to that idea in the
slightest. Mr. Stone is less successful in offering
any final assessment of either the 60's or his hero
than in bringing both back with strange and
spectacular power.
As with any of Mr. Stone's films, the casting (here by
Risa Bramon and Billy Hopkins) is unobtrusively
fascinating. Crispin Glover turns up as Andy Warhol
(in a New York City vignette sure to foster hopes that
no one ever re-enacts the Warhol story), William
Kunstler as the lawyer in Morrison's obscenity trial,
and the real Patricia Kennealy (who Miss Quinlan plays
so glamorously) makes a brief appearance as a
middle-aged witch. Mr. Densmore turns up as a studio
engineer.
Among Mr. Stone's relative regulars, Frank Whaley
makes Robby Krieger quietly compelling, Michael
Wincott makes the Doors' producer a knowing figure,
and Josh Evans has the right brashness as the road
manager stuck with the job of damage control. Miss
Ryan plays Pamela in a cute, dizzy fashion that will
not further Mr. Stone's reputation as a director who
understands women. And she (like the other principals,
in their early scenes) is saddled with a surprisingly
unconvincing wig.
As photographed dynamically by Mr. Stone's usual
cinematographer, Robert Richardson, "The Doors" looks
spookily evocative. It sounds good, too, possibly
because so many of the Doors songs on the soundtrack
are heard in smaller, catchier doses than they were in
their more sprawling original versions. One of Mr.
Stone's most effective tricks is to fade out the sound
entirely at one crucial moment, as Morrison becomes
fatally out of touch with his audience.
"The Doors" concludes in Pere-Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, where Morrison is buried in the company of
Chopin, Bizet, Moliere, Balzac, Proust, Rossini and
others. Even in the final analysis, Mr. Stone's film
sees little irony in this. But it does explain, with
captivating intensity, why Jim Morrison is the one who
gets the visitors.
"The Doors" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying
parent or adult guardian). It includes nudity,
considerable profanity and drug use.
Posted by Tzinana
By JANET MASLIN
The New York Times
March 1, 1991
IN the 60's, for anyone who took the Doors half as
seriously as the Doors took themselves, wide-screen
musical biography was strictly for the Trapp family.
It would have been unimaginable that some day movie
audiences would relive the moment when the guitarist
Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) pulled a scrap of paper
out of his pocket and showed it to the singer Jim
Morrison (Val Kilmer) and the two other Doors, saying
shyly, "I came up with somethin' . . . I call it
'Light My Fire.' "
Unimaginable, perhaps -- but here it is anyway: "The
Doors," Oliver Stone's clamorous, reverential,
much-larger-than-life portrait of the 60's most
self-important rock band. Incendiary even by Mr.
Stone's high standards, "The Doors" presents the
group's career as a brave, visionary rise followed by
a wretched slide into darkness, a slide implemented by
drugs, alcohol, madness, world affairs and the demands
of fame. This view is sure to arouse as strong a
love-hate reaction as the Doors did themselves, but
two things are certain: Mr. Stone retains his ability
to grab an audience by the throat and sustain that
hold for hours, without interruption. And he has
succeeded in raising the dead.
Nowhere did the best and worst of the 60's collide as
messily as they did in Jim Morrison, the Doors'
resident sex symbol and bete noire. "It was Morrison
who wrote most of the Doors' lyrics, the peculiar
character of which was to reflect either an ambiguous
paranoia or a quite unambiguous insistence upon the
love-death as the ultimate high," wrote Joan Didion in
her essay "The White Album," when the Doors were still
at their peak. She also described Morrison's slow,
studied way of holding a lighted match to his black
leather lap.
Morrison's self-destructiveness, which led to
personally dangerous and professionally suicidal
outbursts, was accompanied by a similarly violent
streak aimed at others. In the wrong mood, he was
capable of waving a knife at a friend, dragging a
companion out onto a window ledge, locking a lover in
a closet and then setting the door on fire, or aiming
a microphone stand at an audience, javelin-style. "Why
are you doing this to me?" his girlfriend Pamela (Meg
Ryan) wails during one fight depicted in the movie.
"Because you're in the room," Jim casually replies.
But along with this mean streak ("When I want some
good pagan carnage, I put on the Doors," John Milius
once said), and with the drug and alcohol use that
greatly exacerbated it, came the heady idealism that
accounts for part of the Doors' surprisingly
long-lived popularity. (Another big factor is
Morrison's untimely death, at the age of 27 in 1971,
which turned his alienation, heartthrob looks and
taboo-busting behavior into the makings of an updated
James Dean-Elvis Presley-Lenny Bruce composite.) At
his most darkly ecstatic, Morrison could invoke the
liberating influences of mind-expanding drugs and
literature, calling for his audience to throw off any
and all life-denying constraints.
That call is heeded enthusiastically by Mr. Stone, who
after "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" was
already knee-deep in the 60's, and who now embraces
the Morrison mystique hook, line and sinker. This
wildly avid approach to his subject makes for some
dismaying moments, especially in the film's most
adulatory early stages. ("You wrote this? You got
more?" asks the incredulous organist Ray Manzarek upon
first hearing one of Morrison's songs.) But it is
also, for the director, a source of strong and
unmistakable passion. And one of the things Mr. Stone
does most intoxicatingly is to set forth his
enthusiasms in terms any audience will understand.
"The Doors" begins dangerously, with a startling but
unclear prologue (it is later understood that as a boy
Jim felt the soul of an Indian shaman entering his
consciousness) and with unbridled excitement about the
college-boy intellectual fervor that brought forth
this band. In the film's opening episodes, Jim is seen
courting Pam under a glorious night sky with poetry
and existential small talk ("I feel most alive
experiencing death, confronting pain") and wowing the
impressionable Ray, a fellow student at U.C.L.A. Film
School.
"It's great! It's nonlinear! It's poetry! It's
everything good art stands for!" Ray exclaims after
watching Jim's student film featuring Jim, a leggy
blonde, a television set and images of Nazi Germany.
Mr. Stone, in a goatee, is seen as the pedantic film
professor in this scene, saying, "Eh, pretty
pretentious there, Jim . . . not easy to follow." That
attitude would have been welcome in other parts of the
story, but it is largely absent, which in Mr. Stone's
work is unusual. The best of his other films display
much more critical distance from their subjects than
there is here.
Mr. Stone's other work -- especially his films about
the disorienting effects of wartime experience -- has
also packed more of a psychedelic wallop than "The
Doors" does, despite the fact that psychedelia is an
explicit ingredient this time. The Doors' early drug
trips, especially during one long peyote-dream
sequence in the desert, are fluidly and elaborately
staged. Yet they are also almost redundant, so fully
does the drug culture of the 60's permeate this film
in every frame. Using inventive optical effects,
American Indian imagery, swooping camerawork, odd
angles and the dizzying motion of 30,000 extras (all
told, through the film's various crowd scenes and
concert re-enactments), "The Doors" creates a constant
buzz of lulling, mind-bending confusion. Recaptured
with startling accuracy, it is the perfect visual
backdrop for the Doors' rise and fall.
Prodigious research has gone into this film's minutiae
(like the "Band From Venice" banner that accompanies
the group's first club date on Sunset Strip), and even
into its slightly fabricated episodes. (There was
never a television "Light My Fire" car commercial,
over which Morrison becomes infuriated in the film,
but in fact his three bandmates did agree to sell the
song.) But nowhere is this attention to detail more
astonishing than in Mr. Kilmer's performance, which is
so right it goes well beyond the uncanny. Leading
dauntingly with his chin, projecting sexy insolence,
never losing sight of the singer's magnetism, Mr.
Kilmer captures all of Morrison's reckless,
insinuating appeal. "He liked to find out what the
personal frontiers of the people around him were," the
Doors' producer Paul Rothchild once said
euphemistically, and Mr. Kilmer perfectly captures
that kind of abrasive daring.
Musically, too, Mr. Kilmer is unerringly good. If
anything, he sounds even more like Morrison when
singing a cappella, which he does in a couple of
scenes, than when his extremely serviceable new vocal
renditions are integrated into pre-existing Doors
recordings. Even when lip-synching expertly to the
many Doors songs that are used here, Mr. Kilmer makes
himself utterly convincing. Jim Morrison could sound
grittier and more dangerous than this, and his stage
manner was sometimes more eerily deadpan, but Mr.
Kilmer expertly re-creates the essential Morrison
performance style.
Mr. Kilmer's Jim Morrison is as comfortable
demonstrating his restlessness on a small scale --
stepping in front of a car on Sunset Strip, jumping
boisterously onto the hood and kicking at the driver
-- as he is reigning over the huge concert scenes that
are the film's most ambitious moments. The staging of
these latter scenes courts the ridiculous (Mr. Stone
insists on bringing the dancing Indian shaman in Jim's
mind right onto the stage with him). But it is
shockingly evocative, too. The druggy haze, the fans'
ecstatic dancing, the road crew's expert intervention
with groupies rushing the stage, the hail of flowers
and joints thrown at the musicians, the band's utter
panic over what its lead singer may choose to do next:
all this chaos is re-created with frightening
intensity, and with a compellingly tortured view of
Morrison as both orchestrator and pawn of the surging
crowd.
Some of the film's more intimate moments are just as
weirdly potent, like the Thanksgiving scene chez
Morrison involving acid trips, a knife fight, a
showdown between Jim's two rival girlfriends (Kathleen
Quinlan is especially effective as the avowed witch in
the group), and a duck dinner that gets stomped to
bits in the process. The final stage of Morrison's
life was never easy.
Also re-created here, with remarkable care: scenes on
film stock faded to a 20-year-old orange hue,
reworking real images of the Doors arriving at an
airport and jokingly explaining themselves to an
interviewer; Jim's deliberate, gleeful flouting of the
rules of "The Ed Sullivan Show" (Mr. Kilmer does this
even better than the real Morrison did), and the
scary, sodden performance in Miami that put an end to
Morrison's concert career. The panic of the other
Doors as this last event unfolds (Kevin Dillon is
especially good as the angry, uncertain drummer John
Densmore) provides a striking backdrop for the sad
spectacle of Morrison's dissipation. Mr. Densmore, in
his memoir about the band, writes of beginning to feel
that Morrison was "headed straight for a sad death in
a gutter."
What ruined Jim Morrison? The film, at times, dares to
make the outrageous suggestion that he died for his
audience's sins, but it is possible to be haunted by
"The Doors" without subscribing to that idea in the
slightest. Mr. Stone is less successful in offering
any final assessment of either the 60's or his hero
than in bringing both back with strange and
spectacular power.
As with any of Mr. Stone's films, the casting (here by
Risa Bramon and Billy Hopkins) is unobtrusively
fascinating. Crispin Glover turns up as Andy Warhol
(in a New York City vignette sure to foster hopes that
no one ever re-enacts the Warhol story), William
Kunstler as the lawyer in Morrison's obscenity trial,
and the real Patricia Kennealy (who Miss Quinlan plays
so glamorously) makes a brief appearance as a
middle-aged witch. Mr. Densmore turns up as a studio
engineer.
Among Mr. Stone's relative regulars, Frank Whaley
makes Robby Krieger quietly compelling, Michael
Wincott makes the Doors' producer a knowing figure,
and Josh Evans has the right brashness as the road
manager stuck with the job of damage control. Miss
Ryan plays Pamela in a cute, dizzy fashion that will
not further Mr. Stone's reputation as a director who
understands women. And she (like the other principals,
in their early scenes) is saddled with a surprisingly
unconvincing wig.
As photographed dynamically by Mr. Stone's usual
cinematographer, Robert Richardson, "The Doors" looks
spookily evocative. It sounds good, too, possibly
because so many of the Doors songs on the soundtrack
are heard in smaller, catchier doses than they were in
their more sprawling original versions. One of Mr.
Stone's most effective tricks is to fade out the sound
entirely at one crucial moment, as Morrison becomes
fatally out of touch with his audience.
"The Doors" concludes in Pere-Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, where Morrison is buried in the company of
Chopin, Bizet, Moliere, Balzac, Proust, Rossini and
others. Even in the final analysis, Mr. Stone's film
sees little irony in this. But it does explain, with
captivating intensity, why Jim Morrison is the one who
gets the visitors.
"The Doors" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying
parent or adult guardian). It includes nudity,
considerable profanity and drug use.
Posted by Tzinana