When the music' over turn out the light

Rating: 7/10 (5 September 2011)

***SPOILERS*** The true an tragic story of psychedelic rock music icon Jim Morrison, Val Kilmer, who together with his group "The Doors" went from the heights of Mt. Olympus to the depths of the Qattara Dpression in less then five years. It was in 1965 when Morrison was attending UCLA Film school that he had a revelation, helped by getting stoned on drugs, in the California Desert that he realized that his true calling was in music not film. Now back in civilization Morrison tried his hand on music and with three of his friends Ray Manzaredk Robbie Krieger & John Densmore, Kyle MacLachian Frank Whaley & Kevin Dillion, formed the rock group "The Doors" and the rest is rock & roll or hard rock history.
It what seemed that like almost overnight Morrison's Doors became the most popular singing group in the US! Even eclipsing "The Beatles" & "Rolling Stones" in that they were home grown, born and raised in the USA, unlike their British counterparts. And what's more Jim Morrison & The Doors' music was far more original then any of the English groups. Who for the most part were only singing repackaged 1950's and early 1960's rock & roll bubble-gun music with English accents.
It was at the hight of his popularity that Morrison's self-destructive qualities suddenly started to come to the surface. We get to see in the movie how Morrison began to drink and do drugs almost every hour of the day and night as he was preforming both on and off stage. His womanizing didn't help Morrison either in that he ran the risk of being sued in dozen of paternity suites from the women and young girls,as well as their outraged parents, that he engaged with . That lead to his life long woman companion Pamala Courson, Meg Ryan, becoming so depressed over Morrisons affairs, mostly with groupies, that she herself started turning to drugs on an almost daily basis! That ultimately lead to Pamala dying of an heroin overdose in 1974 at age 27. The same age that Morrison passed away from a suspected, no autopsy was preformed on his body, heroin overdose three years earlier!
It was in 1969 at a concert in Miami that Morrison burnt out and a shell of his former self finally hit rock bottom and self destructed on stage in front of thousand of his fans. His once trim body bolted from beer & booze as well as being drunk and stoned out of his skull Morrison gave the performance of his life! That lead to his arrest on drug and morals, in exposing himself in public, charges that ended up putting him on ice or out of circulating form almost a year. Still Jim Morrison continued to live the kind of scuzzy and drug addictive life that had even his fellow Door members distance themselves and stopped talking to him. That's until he finally realized that his life won't last long with the damage it was doing to him both physically as well as mentally.
In the early summer of 1971 Jim Morrison now trying to get his head back together and turn his already shattered life around traveled to Paris France together with Pamala to either write poetry or paint pictures. It was there that he ended up taking his last breath as well as suspected, but never proved, last mind altering drug trip. Waking up in the early morning of July 3, 1971 Morrison feeling ill and coughing up blood decided to take a hot bath in order to ease the pain. It was there that Pamala found him dead as a doornail a few hours later. Dead from the wild and crazy lifestyle that Jim Morrison lead that both immortalized as well as ended up killing him.
P.S Check out the movie's director Oliver Stone as a film professor at the UCLA film school that Jim Morrison attended. There also the famed defense attorney William Kunstler playing himself as Jim Morrison's lawyer at his booze drug & indecent public exposer trail in Miami Florida.