Nice music, but I don't see the point

Rating: 5/10 (29 March 2008)

Maybe I'm not the "target audience" for this one, but I really wonder who other than huge fans of The Doors (or specifically Jim Morrison, since pretty much 99% of the movie is about him) would really find much to enjoy in this movie. Jim Morrison didn't do anything important, and if he had anything important to say it sure wasn't communicated by this movie. The movie actually makes Morrison look worse than I think he really was, in the sense that I think at his better times he was probably a better performer than what they showed here. Certainly his poetry is not the aspect of his art that I would personally choose to emphasize, and this is where it becomes pretty obvious that the people who made the movie are fans. They've set these horrible poems that he wrote to new 1980s sounding music, just really grating on the ears. Jim Morrison's poetry is OK as lyrics, nothing incredible in my opinion, but when you use them in a spoken word kind of way it betrays the weakness. Then you have to have Meg Ryan who's playing his girlfriend ooh and aaah over the lame poems, and the whole movie just starts off on a really wrong note.
The way they showed the "scene" of that time was very cool, and the movie is very well photographed. When they're not doing Morrison's weak poetry, the songs hold the film together well enough I suppose. I liked that the film wasn't afraid to at least hint at the extremely poor quality of the band's releases from their middle period, especially "The Soft Parade." I recognized a lot of the locations in the film. I think the scene that was supposed to be set in Miami was filmed at what's now called the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (used to be called just the Civic Auditorium but was renamed after Graham, who co-produced this film incidentally, died in that crash with Stevie Ray Vaughn). I saw Phil Lesh there a couple months ago. The big outdoor scenes look like they were shot on Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park in SF. I've seen a lot of shows there, Graham used to use it for his free shows and they still do bluegrass festivals there every year. The place they used for the "Whiskey" might have been the Red Devil Lounge but I'm not 100% sure on that. They also used the Warfield for some of the scenes when the Doors are supposed to be at their peak, that's the theater you see with the tiered balconies.
For me the movie was mildly enjoyable because I do like some of the Doors songs and I liked the re-creation of the late 60s scene in L.A. and S.F. Another thing I liked was Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol, I didn't recognize him until the performance was over, great job. The cast is really good in general actually. Val Kilmer was very good as Morrison considering there's so little to work with. Meg Ryan had a very tough character, people don't sympathize with a groupie like her. She did OK. Coincidentally both Wes Studi and Michael Wincott were in both this movie and "Seraphim Falls" which I watched the same day. It made me realize how much I actually like Michael Wincott in particular, though I've never known his name until now.
My main problem with the movie is just the fact that it seems to take for granted that we actually care about James Douglas Morrison. I guess we should give it credit for not straining too hard to make him out to be some kind of hero -- but then again we did get exposed to a montage that included images like Martin Luther King Jr. I don't know what the heck MLK has to do with Jim Morrison, it seems like the film is reaching for context. And all that stuff with the Native Americans, you get sick of seeing that in every Oliver Stone movie. Racial guilt is hardly a good emotion to pin your character on. Maybe I just don't get it. The image of the Native Americans are supposed to be tied to his death wish, to his idea of having a good death. As far as I can tell they got just as far in the lame movie Morrison made where he quoted Nietzsche. Either I'm really missing something, or Stone is pulling strings that he invented himself.