Aug 9, 2010

Aftermath: The Doors

Movie:
“The Doors” (1991); Directed by Oliver Stone, who really should just stop. Dreamed up in a lurid vision of dancing demons in this desert that we call America, man, by Stone and Randall Johnson.

Genre:
Remember the ‘60s and just what, like, an amazing time and place it was? … Oh yeah!? Well, you weren’t there, man, so you’ll just, like, never know!

Starring:
Val Kilmer as Iceman, Meg Ryan as a long-suffering hippie girlfriend who’s still just cute-as-a-button!

Nodded Off/Nyquil Kicked In Around:
While Kilmer, as Jim Morrison, was writhing around on the floor in tight pants, shouting incoherently. I realize that this could have been at any time during the film.

Observation/Life Lesson:
The Doors were made up of a transcendentalist, inventive keyboardist who also deftly handled the bassline; a guitarist who combined flamenco-style finger-picking with bottleneck blues sensibilities; a drummer who fused elements of rock with the complexities of jazz; and a guy who mumbled/yelled into a microphone and fell down a lot. Guess which one Oliver Stone focused on?

As a band, The Doors are OK, and Morrison’s poetry is mostly harmless, though if you’re reading it and and you aren’t a middle school-aged girl, there’s probably something wrong with you. Kilmer’s Morrison is kind of a slouched, pouty hipster who throws tantrums because, people just, don’t like, get it, man. He's perpetually caught in a weird place between alcohol, drugs, and petulance. The movie itself is filmed as if it wants to take the viewer along on Morrison’s drug trips, and the resulting camera work is a little nauseating.

“The Doors,” however, has bigger problems than Stone’s look-how-cool-I-can-be directorial style, as it suffers from an acute and fatal form of 1960s Nostalgia Disease. During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it seemed, television and film makers were obsessed with cramming anything that had to do with the ‘60s counter-culture down the collective mass media maw. And we ate it up. We watched “The Wonder Years,” suffered thought countless Woodstock retrospectives, and there was, of course, this:



Am I adverse to every pop culture element of the 1960s? Not at all. But can we leave the baby and get rid of some of this bathwater?

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