When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors
The most hilarious rock movie since This is Spinal Tap is, sadly, not supposed to be a comedy...
Tara Brady, 05 Jul 2010
Uh-oh. The most hilarious rock movie since This is Spinal Tap is, sadly, not supposed to be a comedy. Directed by one-time hipster Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Living In Oblivion, The Real Blonde) and narrated by the equally swell Johnny Depp, When You're Strange is, from the get-go, hampered by the familiarity of its material.
Between Oliver Stone's dreadful biopic, the best selling biography No One Here Gets Out Alive and countless VHI specials, the Jim Morrison story has been as widely disseminated as the New Testament. This latest doc, far from seeking a novel approach, eschews new interviews and ideas in favour of archive footage and puerile commentary.
Seasoned Doors watchers may well sigh as they view, for the 3,142nd time, that footage with Morrison looking enigmatically at the camera when asked to name his profession. It does not help that much of the band's history now plays like parody: charismatic lead singer drops acid, gets fat, rejects music in favour of bad poetry, and dies. It does not help either that the narration sounds like it was written by a teenager. Morrison is hailed as a genius because "he picks out his own clothes". He is continuously celebrated in sweeping and painfully pretentious utterances, as a "frenzied trapeze artist", and as "dangerous and highly intelligent: no one has had this exact combination of things before". Really? No one? In the history of the world?
To be fair, Mr. DiCillo works montage to great effect and the film wisely ignores tales of Indian spirits and makes some attempt to talk about the band's musicianship. It's enough to make for a better Doors study guide than the Val Kilmer movie, but only just.
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