comment #1

Gordn27 says ...

It would've been nice if this had come along ten or fifteen years ago, when there were still a few people left who liked the Doors.

Now it's just me (and I guess Jeff), and I think this movie sounds dumb.

comment #2

Jeffrey Wells says ...

It's not dumb -- just with poorly written narration. There's still the footage, which is great. And the music, of course.

comment #3

JD says ...

In general, 30 seems to be the cut-off point as far as Doors interest is concerned. My friends who are over 30 generally like The Doors, whereas my friends under 30 just wanna make fun of them. Both perspectives are sort of credible, though I own all their albums... so I'm clearly 30+.

comment #4

Travis Crabtree says ...

That is actually DeCillo's voice in the earlier version. Had you not heard that it's been replaced by Johnny Depp?

comment #5

sumo-pop says ...

This may make me a bad person, but I love Stone's version of The Doors. And yes, I do recognize that it is "Stone's version," but there it is.

comment #6

Travis Crabtree says ...

The cliche thing bums me out a little. Door's music is one of those things I've almost been forced into NOT liking. As a teen I went through a 60's music faze and, (along with hearing them in "Apocalypse Now"), I found myself buying all of their albums and really digging them.

Since then, I've had to deal with the Stone movie, living near the old Morrison house in Laurel Canyon (and the riff-raff that goes along with that), hearing their music again and again to the point of madness and listening to all manner of Stone-like jack-offs talking about Morrison like he floated down from Planet Awesome to personally change the brainwaves of earthlings like ourselves through his masterful poetry and cortex-snapping music.

Ugh.

I'm interested in the film, but the above mentioned narration sounds scary.

"Jim Morrison, poet? He's a silly Los Angeles person." - Lou Reed

"CRACK" (the sound of Janis Joplin's Southern Comfort bottle shattering over Jim Morrison's skull at Barney's Beanery)

comment #7

Travis Crabtree says ...

FYI

I wasn't kidding about the Depp thing.

comment #8

dangovich says ...

Travis, don't let the douches poison your relationship with the music. It was, and is, great. Maybe the best American rock band ever.

I still can't get over that Oliver Stone had Kilmer spit out the lyrics "you know we couldn't get much higher" like a petulant child in the Ed Sullivan Show scene. In the real performance, Morrison just sang it--no big deal.

comment #9

Travis Crabtree says ...

(True story...second hand...)

While filming "The Doors" out in the desert, Kilmer, (who was high on.....life?) decided during a down moment that he needed to take a dump... so he wandered back into a cave and left a pile. Several people saw him emerge from the cave where he said something like, "hey, I was just checking out that crazy cave".

Little bit later the first A.D. sent the grips in to light for the next shot.... IN THAT CAVE. A couple of guys emerged holding their noses.... "something took a big old dump in there".... many eyes turned to Kilmer...

comment #10

BurmaShave says ...

I can't handle the idea of Jim Morrison or The Doors ever being entirely earnest, so their fans make it hard for me to handle the music. Some gems though. I'm more of an 'L.A. Woman' type of guy though.

comment #11

BurmaShave says ...

Also Travis that story is perfect.

comment #12

Ulysses says ...

I kinda liked Oliver Stone's Doors movie when it first came out. After re-watching it about a year ago, I found it to be self-indulgent hooey, and that the Morrison portrayed in the movie would be a guy that I'd run away to avoid.

In the very slight Bill Fishman film, My Dinner with Jimi, ostensibly about Turtle Howard Kaylan's adventures as a rock star, the chap playing Morrison (Bret Roberts) apparently got the manic energy of Jimbo, who Kaylan calls, as I recall a bit of a goofball with a great sense of humour.

comment #13

actionman says ...

L.A. Woman is my favorite song and The Doors are my favorite musical group. I cannot fucking wait to see this movie.

Travis -- thanks for sharing. Love it.

comment #14

SmilingPolitely says ...

Ray Manzarek has said he's had no input into the film, but that he's seen it and likes it, calling it 'a tale of American shamanism' with a touch of the 'supernatural.'
-----------------------------------
I swear, for all the bitching Ray Manzarek has done over the years, he's never actually seen Stone's flick. The movie Manzarek always says he liked to see get made about The Doors sounds EXACTLY like the version Oliver Stone did make.

comment #15

thevisceral says ...

The endless fascination with The Doors is somewhat puzzling. They were an okay blues-rock band. They sucked profoundly when they got arty.

comment #16

MAGGA says ...

I worship at the altar of Oliver Stone's The Doors because it's the only music biopic I've seen that IS it's subject rather than ABOUT it. With a lot of poetic license, sure, but every time I've seen it, I've felt like I've walked through the mythological pop-cult landscape of Americas Golden Age with my brain full of Grade A acid.

I love it so much that I thought I loved the Doors. When I lived in Paris, me, a metal-head and a cute girl we'd just met wanted to stay up after an after-party and took the first Metro out to the graveyard. It was closed, but one of the doors was slightly broken and we managed to sneak in. We found his grave, where one usually has to stand in line in order to spend a few minutes, and sat there for about an hour, by ourselves, cracking open a bottle of wine and sharing a joint. We were about to engage in a sing-along of his greatest hits when it dawned on us that none of us actually remembered the lyrics, apart from the famous lines in movies etc. Then we got paranoid of heroin needles, went back home and listened to the first half of the first album before switching to the far superior Velvet Underground and falling asleep.

comment #17

DukeSavoy says ...

Love the Doors, but understand those who are weary of the music.

It's been 40 since they took the stage -- 21 million minutes.

"Light My Fire" 3 million times. Crazy skull talk.

comment #18

Gordn27 says ...

I really enjoy Oliver Stone's movie, because I think it's the quintessential "how it feels" about the mythology behind "60's rock and roll" as an abstract. It's not a particularly good biopic, though.

I still love the music (though I listen to it less and less), but I've gotten the impression that pop culture has now come down firmly on the side of "The Doors are a joke". And, to be fair, I think that if you try to take Jim Morrison seriously as an artist or a poet, then yeah, it's a joke. It's too bad that Morrison *wanted* to be a poet, because he was only a great rock star. [I also think it would've been great if Dylan had stayed a poet instead of chasing being a rock star, though he was better at that than Morrison was at poetry.]

comment #19

lazarus says ...

The band and Stone's film about them are tough to take seriously at this point, especially Morrison. But they were both pretty unique in their respective approaches, and should be commended for it. I rarely put The Doors on my stereo (but never turn them off when they come on the radio) and can barely appreciate them for how overplayed they were for so long (the late 80's/early 90's resurgence with kids became almost unbearable), but I'd hate to think of rock history without them.

comment #20

BurmaShave says ...

I know, imagine how bad white blues rock would be if it'd been carried only by Led Zeppelin and the Stones.

comment #21

DeeZee says ...

Didn't know you could still be considered profitable when you were just fined for half a billion.
Yeah, he really makes me feel fear
So Power Rangers is bad for kids, Tom Green is wholesome entertainment?
Dinner for Schmucks trailer.
New Nightmare trailer and clip.
War of the Gods clashes with other brand.
I guess the lies about
vaccination made him look bad.
Warner home theater chat transcript.
Digital Bits notes the restored Metropolis heading to DVD/BD in November.

comment #22

Gordn27 says ...

"Didn't know you could still be considered profitable when you were just fined for half a billion."

Not that I know what you're talking about [no surprise there], but, yeah, pretty much any company that made more than half a billion dollars would still be profitable after being fined a half a billion dollars. There are more or less an infinite number of numbers bigger than half a billion.

comment #23

DeeZee says ...

Gordon: I only mentioned [url=http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_440.html]this[/url] a few times now.
Anyway, after seeing that pic of the couple, my inner-Lex is wondering when McCarthy let herself go so much. She looks like a dude dressed like a chick in that pic.

comment #24

DeeZee says ...

Fixed.

comment #25

Gordn27 says ...

"I only mentioned [url=http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_440.html]this[/url] a few times now."

Hahahahaha. I get it, you're building a narrative, but people have to pay really close attention to all of your important links in order to really get the whole story. That's a good idea. One thing you've needed is to make your links more insular so that they're even less appealing to everybody posting here.

comment #26

BurmaShave says ...

Gordn, I'm guilty of it too from time to time, but I think you need to stop reacting to Dee. This is how these threads go off the rails as much as anything. I think we had a good one going here too, amazingly free of animosity.

comment #27

Gordn27 says ...

yeah, fair enough. (I usually try to keep it in threads that are already dead anyway)

Kids in the Hall has this to say on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xillqqt0Y0

comment #28

markj says ...

Love The Doors. Really looking forward to this doc.

comment #29

DeeZee says ...

Blockbuster and three major studios try to carve out a new monopoly on rentals.
Latest Nuart schedule.

comment #30

Rich S. says ...

I've always liked the Doors, but, seeing how I haven't paid much attention to them in the last few years, I was not aware that the pop culture opinion had turned against them.

I'm not completely surprised. My own opinion kind of changed, ironically with the release of Stone's movie. I liked it as an extended music video, but found it hard to take a lot of the mysticism seriously. This is particularly since I doubt Morrison really took it all that seriously. I think, like most rock stars, he mostly just wanted to get high and get laid.

In the end, I've always thought the Doors were a good band with one great songwriter and musician (Robbie Krieger), and a male-model-esque loon that women seemed to really, really like. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing to get too excited about.

comment #31

TL says ...

In general, 30 seems to be the cut-off point as far as Doors interest is concerned. My friends who are over 30 generally like The Doors, whereas my friends under 30 just wanna make fun of them.

Funny, my experience is just the opposite -- all the "shamanism," psychedelic poetry, pseudo-jazz, death romanticism, etc., was real exciting when I was a teenager. Now it just seems kind of pretentious. "The Celebration of the Lizard" -- seriously?

That being said, the Doors did write some great tracks -- "Not to Touch the Earth," "Five to One," "LA Woman," "Roadhouse Blues" all come to mind.

comment #32

phantasmata says ...

"Jim Morrison, poet? He's a silly Los Angeles person." - Lou Reed

oh, lou, don't be jealous because nico wanted morrison's nuts. now, i like both the velvet underground and the doors, but i could never understand why the former is so highly respected while the latter is derided as a "joke." say what you want about morrison, but at least he never put out a metal machine music. and even though few will admit it, he's had an enormous impact on rock stars and pop stars. everyone from axl rose to fergie have taken cues from him. and say what you want about the doors, but at least actually wrote dozens of good to great songs that have stood the test of time.

pity they were from l.a., otherwise they would probably be more respected like "serious" ny bands.

comment #33

Gordn27 says ...

I prefer the Doors to the Velvet Underground, but Lou Reed never had to try as hard to be a weirdo artist as Morrison consistently did.

comment #34

George Prager says ...

I liked THE DOORS. The Doors, on the other hand, made one good album and a couple of good singles. The Velvets made 5 great albums.

comment #35

dixiedugan66 says ...

The husband is already eagerly anticipating the screen release. I like The Doors, but fear I'll be sick of hearing Morrison Hotel, which I'm sure he'll stick in the player many times over the next couple of weeks.

I'm pretty sure this is playing on PBS too, but probably edited.