The definative rock bio (and that's NOT a complement)

Rating: Null/10 (18 June 2003)

Rock bios. Is there anything sillier? Sometimes they can be okay, but normally, they're just sleazified accounts of our heros (or anti-heros) which are so very boring. The pacing is usually sluggish and the characters have diolauge that sucks. This is the film that has all of those bad points, but also many of the good traits (although, I can't remember any esoteric jokes for Doors fans like the film BACKBEAT had for Beatles fans, like using song titles in the diolauge). One of the first things to note is that the second-highest billing goes to a character who didn't exist! Patricia, is simply a composite character invented to shorten the economy of characters yet still tell famous tales of Morrison's life. I didn't like this character and, while I don't know whether Morrison ever did try and convince a girlfriend to have an abortion, I sure didn't think it was a cool scene. I'll return to the bad in a little bit. On the other hand, the cast of a rock bio is almost always good. Val Kilmer is fabulous as the Lizard King. The whole band seems accurate, except Kevin Dillon seems somewhat cockier than John Densmore ever did in real life. Meg Ryan was probably pretty accurate as Pamela, and Crispin Glover is great as Andy Warhol. The music is, of course, excellent, although a friend of mine has the album and if they were going to use a Velvet Underground song on it, they should have put more artists on it for consistancy's sake or take theirs off and have an all Doors affair. Back to the bad. Not only is the Patricia character little more than an on switch for bad Morrison (or, rather, particularly bad Morrison), she also messes up the relationship between Jimbo and Pam Courson. Did he really need two love interests? Usually, filmmakers ignore infedelities and make the guy's chick his one-and-only. Why go to the trouble of creating someone else? As for the diolauge. Yes, the diolauge ALWAYS sucks in biopics, especially rock biopics, especially this one! Nothing slows down the pacing of a film like exposition, but this one is a nightmeare in that regard! Take the scene where Krieger presents "Light My Fire" and they improve upon it. It's as if they read a brief discription of what everyone did and recited what they're supposed to do and tried adding a modicum of non squiter to cover it up. It's just labored exposition that doesn't sound like things people would say. Now, Manzarek and Morrison meet, obviously, in a film class. The way it's portrayed, Morrison makes a bizzare and depressing film about NAZIs and other nonsense. According to Manzarek's book LIGHT MY FIRE, it was nothing like that. Indeed, Morrison is notorious for his horrible antics, but the film makes him out to be essentially pure evil. It portrays Morrison as having no redeeming value. He's basically portrayed as a pied piper of horror and misery and people either react to him in disgust, use him to further themselves (Warhol, the briefly-seen photographer, the patricia monstrosity) or submit to him as if he's a high priest. Never has a music bio been so condescending and yet so distrustful. On many levels, this film is entertaining and competant. Even exciting at times. But mostly, it's a depressing character assassination. Stone is obviously fascinated by Morrison, but this film plays almost more like a docudrama about a disease or serial killer whose makers fall under a spell. Stone's worst crime is that he didn't give us a film about someone he admires, but someone he's obsessed with in a negative way. He doesn't seem to like Morrison. It's as if he's afraid of him.