Surviving Doors pleased with new documentary
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36220603/ns/entertainment-movies/
Band members appreciate Depp's careful reading of Jim Morrison poems
By Natalie Rotman
April 7, 2010
LOS ANGELES - The Doors story has always been a strange one. Now, a
feature-length documentary offers some new insight into the legendary
rock group.
Narrated by Johnny Depp, "When You're Strange: A Film About The
Doors" opens in limited release this weekend, offering
never-before-seen footage, including singer Jim Morrison in an
experimental film called "HWY (Highway)."
Morrison, who died in 1971, guitarist Robby Krieger, keyboardist Ray
Manzarek and drummer John Densmore made six studio albums in just 54
months in the late 1960s and early '70s. Four decades after they last
played together, the group continues to sell over one-million units a year.
Manzarek, who met Morrison while attending UCLA, has since authored
several books and recorded numerous solo albums. Krieger, who wrote
the chart-topping hit "Light My Fire" at age 18, is working on a book
about his life and will release a new album later this year. Densmore
is a best-selling writer, with his latest book due out later this year.
Densmore, Krieger, Manzarek and "When You're Strange" director Tom
DiCillo took some questions recently at a press gathering at a Los
Angeles hotel. Although Densmore and DiCillo were in one room and
Krieger and Manzarek in another, they were asked the same questions.
AP: What did you feel the first time you saw "When You're Strange"?
MANZAREK: At once a sad experience. My heart was heavy and yet joyous
seeing all of us: Kid Krieger, Kid Manzarek, my wife Dorothy Kid
Dorothy Fujikowa. Bunch of kids. It was really great.
KRIEGER: Nostalgic. What I took from it was how great we were. I was
amazed at how good we played. Because when you are doing it you go
"OK. We are just playing. You know, we are pretty good. We are as
good as The Beatles, aren't we?" But looking back, you are afraid
that maybe we weren't any good and maybe this is going to look embarrassing.
DENSMORE: I knew all the footage, but I was very pleased that he
(DiCillo) found a narrative and put it together. That he went with
Johnny Depp to have you have an experience of the band rather than
watch me talking about it. Like I am doing now.
AP: What did you think the first time you heard Johnny Depp reading
Jim Morrison's poetry in the film?
DENSMORE: Very pleased at his kind, shy, careful, non-ego type of
reading. He just got it. He is an icon. He understands Jim.
KRIEGER: He has got this great voice and it sounds like he really
cares about what he is saying, you know. Just works perfectly for the
movie. We tried a few other guys before Johnny Depp. It just didn't
work. But this was right on. I heard later that he was a big Doors
fan. I said, "That's why he did so good."
MANZAREK: I thought it was excellent. I thought he did a brilliant
job. I thought his voice was at once understated and dynamic at the
same time and he told the story beautifully.
AP: Do you have a favorite poem of Jim's?
KRIEGER: "Visitation of Energy." Not sure why. I just love the way it feels.
MANZAREK: I have got a short Jim Morrison American haiku. It goes,
"Snakeskin jacket. Indian eyes. Brilliant hair. He moves in disturbed
Nile insect air." Great words.
DENSMORE: I like "American Prayer" quite a bit. Talks about our
country's struggles, then, at the end, what are those lines? "I will
not go. Prefer a feast of friends. To the giant family. I am human. I
love being here, but it's hard. Oh, great creator being, grant us one
more hour to perform our art and perform our lives."
AP: The film features scenes from "HWY (Highway)." What are you
thinking when you look at that footage now?
MANZAREK: He is alive. It lives. Jim is alive again. It was fabulous.
It's like he is not gone. There he is, man. He is right up on the screen.
DICILLO: We had a problem because people would refuse to believe it
was Morrison. It never struck me for a second when I saw that footage
that people would have that reaction, that they would say, "It's not
him." I thought the exact opposite would happen. That footage was
shot on 35-millimeter negative in 1969.
DENSMORE: Someone stormed out at Sundance, a journalist in the first
few minutes, infuriated. I like that. You are going to make them
aware that is the real deal. Even with the beard, he is very
charismatic. It looks so good, people think we are doing a reality show.
KRIEGER: I hope that people don't think that this is an actor playing
Jim Morrison. It looks so good, so new. That is probably what they
are going to think. But they will find out that is really Jim. I wish
that Jim had finished that film. They only did about 10 minutes
worth. It would have been a great movie.
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'When You're Strange' opens no Doors
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36176223/ns/entertainment-movies/
Documentary about legendary band offers no new insights or interviews
By Glenn Whipp
April 5, 2010
Tom DiCillo's "When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors" means to
answer the more loony flights of fancy taken by Oliver Stone in his
1991 Doors biopic, but, in the process, creates a formal exercise in
redundancy, offering no new insights into the much mythologized rock band.
The documentary does boast unseen archival footage of Doors band
members Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore
rehearsing, performing, hanging out backstage and, in the case of
singer Morrison, defining, for better and worse, the rock-star
template that some musicians still follow to this day.
Die-hard fans will also revel in seeing several scenes from "HWY," an
experimental film Morrison made with friends in 1969 out in the
Southern California desert. We watch The Lizard King driving and
crashing a '66 Mustang fastback, covering a dying coyote with a
blanket and lending his camera-ready charisma to the role of aimless drifter.
That home movie footage is more revelatory than anything else in
DiCillo's film, which rehashes the band's well-chronicled,
boom-to-bust history in rote fashion.
DiCillo ("Living in Oblivion") inserts the same '60s news clips that
we've seen a million times JFK, MLK and RFK shot, Vietnam,
civil-rights marches to let us know that, yes, the decade was
tumultuous. DiCillo constantly fudges with the timeline, though, in a
pointless effort to have The Doors' music directly comment on the
major news events.
Why no new interviews?
Instead of "The Wonder Years" montages, the movie would have
benefited enormously from new interviews with the surviving band
members. Perhaps legal entanglements prevented that from happening.
Densmore has successfully sued Krieger and Manzarek over the years
for using the band's name and logo in new incarnations.
Undoubtedly, the trio would have had some interesting (and
conflicting) things to say about The Doors' legacy, but their
thoughts might not have jibed with the kind of reductive myth-making
that DiCillo seeks with his movie.
Johnny Depp provides the narration, dutifully reading the bland
script and trying to lend a measure of
soulfulness to the textbook-quality words.
But, with all due respect to Depp's trademark cool, the movie's mojo
rises only when the music takes over. In this regard, DiCillo does
succeed in explaining why The Doors' timeless blend of classical,
blues, Eastern music and pop continues to resonate with new
generations of listeners.
The personality cult that has grown around Morrison's self-styled
Dionysus image has played a part in maintaining interest. As the
movie notes, toward the end, fans came to the band's infrequent
concerts not for the music, but for the "spectacle."
"It didn't seem like actual entertainment," complains one paying
customer, following The Doors' infamous 1969 Miami concert, after
which Morrison was charged with a felony count of lewd and lascivious behavior.
As bogus as the charge might have been, there's little disputing the
concertgoer's point.
--------
"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/08/when_youre_strange/index.html
Almost 20 years after Oliver Stone's legendary "The Doors," Tom
DiCillo's doc takes on the Lizard King
By Andrew O'Hehir
Apr 8, 2010
During a concert recording heard on the soundtrack of Tom DiCillo's
trippy, fascinating documentary "When You're Strange," Doors lead
singer Jim Morrison demands of his audience, "Would anybody in here
like to see my genitals?" When the response to that rhetorical
question has died down, Morrison continues: "I don't think there
should even be a president, man. I think we should have total democracy."
It would be easy to conclude that the Lizard King was massively
wasted on booze or hash or acid or some other drug cocktail of choice
on that occasion, and that moreover he was kind of a self-important
idiot. Both things are very likely true, but the intellectual thread
that connects Jim Morrison's cock to the White House is not as flimsy
as it appears. However you feel about the Doors and their music --
and DiCillo's generous and substantial film leaves room for varying
interpretations -- the band had an outsize cultural impact, embodying
the Dionysian macho-rebel spirit of late-'60s white (male) American
youth with psilocybin intensity.
At this point, documentaries about '60s rock bands constitute their
own genre, and it's frequently a tiresome one: Clips of civil-rights
protests and Vietnam firefights, a highlight tour of assassinations
and campus uprisings. There's a little bit of all that in "When
You're Strange," but the film stands out for several reasons. There's
the total absence of talking-head interviews with grizzled scenesters
(or any other present-day footage); the cool and measured narration
by Johnny Depp (clearly the perfect choice); the direction by
DiCillo, a hard-luck indie veteran making his first documentary.
"When You're Strange" is also free of the "fair use" copyright
restrictions that plague so many rock docs. All the surviving band
members signed off on the project, and you'll hear all the major
Doors hits (from "Break on Through" and "Light My Fire" to "L.A.
Woman" and "Riders on the Storm") in this film, which has been timed
to accompany a 13-song soundtrack release from Rhino Entertainment.
"When You're Strange" consists almost entirely of archival material:
home movies and photos, concert and rehearsal footage, period TV
broadcasts, even clips from a UCLA student film in which Morrison
appeared before he became famous. Especially since we're talking
about a band whose entire career spanned less than five years (from
early 1967 to Morrison's death in the summer of '71), this strategy
collapses the historical distance between us and the Doors, and
spares us the morass of maudlin pseudo-Proustian reflection into
which many such pop-nostalgia films tumble. Furthermore, this
underscores the ways that Morrison, in all his confusion and
self-contradiction -- reclusive poet, leather-clad sex god, reluctant
celebrity, abusive drunk, pop star with limited musical gifts --
remains a vital cultural force, the conscious or unconscious model
for many rock stars, actors or rappers who came later.
While it's entirely true that nobody's made a Doors documentary
before, the band has already been the subject of a quasi-legendary
film. Oliver Stone's 1991 "The Doors," featuring a mumbling,
incoherent Val Kilmer as Morrison, is the ne plus ultra of fictional
'60s films. It transcends the so-bad-it's-good genre in a lysergic,
sweat-lodge cloudburst. It's not even quite accurate to say that "The
Doors" is so bad it's a masterpiece, although that's close. It's more
like a risible mass of clichés and a visionary masterwork of cinema
at one and the same moment. Even though Doors guitarist Robby Krieger
and drummer John Densmore served as "technical advisors" to Stone's
movie, they were irritated by its portrayal of Morrison as a
drug-addled, death-obsessed shamanistic babbler. Keyboardist Ray
Manzarek (who refused to help Stone) has long vowed to help produce
an "anti-Oliver Stone" movie that would tell the band's real story.
Almost 20 years later, "When You're Strange" is that movie.
Certainly the historical Morrison we see in DiCillo's film is a long
way from Kilmer's debauched rock idol, and more a nuanced, confused
human being. The son of a career Navy officer -- an admiral who
commanded a fleet during the Vietnam War -- Morrison grew up
infatuated by Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Elvis Presley, which
is almost all you need to know about him in one sentence. The band's
name came not from Aldous Huxley's drug memoir "The Doors of
Perception" but from Huxley's original source, Blake's poem "The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
Morrison reportedly disliked his own singing voice (he preferred
Frank Sinatra's) and told a friend he was afraid he had nothing to
say. As Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol could have told him, none of
that mattered: Morrison's brooding, let's-fuck persona and
unpredictable stage behavior sent their own message, for which the
Doors' music, and even his own droning baritone and portentous
lyrics, sometimes seemed like context or background.
That said, DiCillo does an outstanding job of explaining the Doors'
musical oddness: They were a rock band with no bass player to keep
the beat, whose members had little rock experience. Morrison had
never sung before (outside the shower) and Manzarek was a classically
trained pianist and organist. Densmore was a big-band and jazz
drummer, and Krieger a flamenco guitarist. They weren't aping either
Chicago blues or Merseyside pop, they didn't sound quite like anyone
else and there genuinely was something elliptical -- something
symbolic or even spiritual -- behind the sex-and-drugs double
entendres of their songwriting.
"When You're Strange" offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse
at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in
American cultural history, period. Certainly all the legendary
episodes are here: the Doors' sudden lurch from third billing at the
Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip to a three-record deal with
Elektra; their acid-trip forays into Joshua Tree and marathon
recording sessions with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick; Morrison
passing out on stage in Amsterdam, antagonizing cops in New Haven and
(apocryphally) exposing himself in Miami. (The wacky witch-journalist
girlfriend, played by Kathleen Quinlan in Stone's film, is reduced to
an unnamed parenthetical here.)
Still, even though this authoritative and often mesmerizing film
provides a crucial counterweight to Stone's "The Doors," it could use
a little of the latter film's bogus Nietzsche-Blake-Huxley
babblequest. To grasp what Jim Morrison and the Doors were all about,
you need to watch both movies one after the other, consume a whole
bunch of drugs and beer and sugar and then drive out into the
American desert half-dead from hangover. And then maybe you'll
understand it all for a split second, or understand that there was
never anything to understand in the first place, or that you already
understood it as well as you ever will. I'm sure Doors fanatics
already know this, but DiCillo's movie blew my mind in revealing that
"Mr. Mojo Risin'," the repetitive chant from the end of "L.A. Woman,"
is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." Whoa. Damn! This shit is powerful, dude.
--
"When You're Strange" is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago,
Dallas, Los Angeles, Madison, Wis., New York, Nashville,
Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, with more cities to follow.
.
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