When You're Strange

"When You're Strange" recounts quite well the history of the 1960s rock band "The Doors" and its famous, charismatic vocalist Jim Morrison. Using archival and backstage footage, some early home pictures of Morrison, and integrating a history of the band's roots and rocky ride with then-current social upheavals, the film conveys all the chaos, change, and creativity that marked that turbulent era.

Some of the narrative retells information that the band's devotees have known for decades, like the origin of the name "The Doors", a reference to Aldous Huxley's 1954 book "The Doors Of Perception". And the very first song Robby Krieger wrote was "Light My Fire". But old details can be informative to new fans.

The film's choppy structure probably had some symbolic significance. But the first five minutes seemed unnecessary. And I could have done without the scenes of Morrison driving a car through the desert, which seemed irrelevant and out of context.

As someone who has been mesmerized by The Doors for a long time, I don't think I learned anything new. Yet, the never-before-seen visuals, Morrison's on-stage performances and backstage personality, combined with all that strange music, at times carnivalesque and at other times bluesy, were enormously interesting. About midway through, Morrison comes across best, as he sings "Touch Me", accompanied by an orchestra.

What's disconcerting is the change in Morrison. He starts out innocent and shy, then quickly morphs into an outrageous showman. His indulgence in drugs and hard drinking did him no favors. However, that over-the-edge artistic style was common in the 1960s. And death arrived at the early age of 27 not only for Morrison, but also for Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Morrison's girlfriend, Pamela Courson.

Forty years after his death, Jim Morrison still fascinates people. Part of that derives from his untimely death. But I think he and The Doors resonate today because they were musical poets, social revolutionaries who saw the inhumanity and evil in the world, and tried to change it, through music. With maybe a couple of exceptions, we do not now have comparably influential poets. Jim Morrison and The Doors call to us from the past.

I'm a big fan of The Doors and pretty much knew the story before watching this film. And yet I found Johnny Depp to be a very convincing narrator (usually I find narrators to be quite annoying in documentaries!), and the film was quite fluid and easy to watch. Some really cool footage as well! For anyone who's interested, Oliver Stone's 1992 film The Doors is a good and fairly accurate non-documentary worth watching, if you haven't seen it already.

"When You're Strange" is a music Documentary, which takes you through the short career of a world famous 1960's band, The Doors.

For this alone, the documentary is worth watching. That said, this is so interesting to watch, because it is a story with so many levels, mainly because it took place in a time, when things were changing.

It was the 1960s. A still growing group of people invented in the 50s, namely the young, could and would not be ignored any longer. As Morrison put it: 'we want the world, and we want it now' To them things were not black and white anymore. Men and women were not men and women, but human beings. The solution was definitely not war, but the absolute opposite. On the other hand the parents, and older generations, were stubbornly holding on to the old order and its values, and a larger and larger gap was growing between these two fronts.

The spotlight in this film is heavily focused on the Doors most famous member, Jim Morrison, and for a good reason. Jim Morrison became a clear symbol of the new, and the young, mainly because he wanted more out of life than the norms allowed, and simply went for it. On top of this, Jim had an interesting background, which is a prime example of the generation gap. Jim Morrisons father George Morrison was an admiral in the navy, and was involved in the Vietnam war. He was against Jim's involvement in rock music, wanted his hair cut, and to get an education. Jim ignored his parents to such an extend that he claimed his family dead, when asked by journalists.

If you know the story of The Doors and Jim Morrison already, this will be a stringent summary of the events with a well written and good narration by Johnny Depp. There is nothing new in the story itself and thankfully no conspiracy theories about Morrisons death. Where this documentary really shines and adds yet another level, is through the footage and the way this is put together. Some of this footage has never been shown before, and parts of it is still so crisp and clear that it's eerie. It is bound to send you on an emotional ride, if you were a fan when it mattered the most - when you were young.

So in conclusion this falls two stars shy of ten because of the only fall through i noticed. When a letter from Morrisons father is brought up, it mentions only one paragraph of this well meaning letter, and uses it out of context to create drama. This is a 2 star fail in an otherwise clear cut and to the bone fact telling documentary.

When You're Strange is made up of all archival footage, clips taken from some famous scenes (i.e. Ed Sullivan Show appearance, intro's at the airport, infamous concert) and not-so-famous ones (clips from the rarely seen films Highway and Feast of Friends are seen here), and it's done in what could be called objectively adulatory. That might not make sense, but what Tom DiCillo wants to show is what the Doors were like, the times they were in, and what was up with their frontman, Jim Morrison, who was with the band for five years before dying one night in a bathtub under mysterious circumstances. At the same time as he's giving us the facts via narration read by Johnny Depp, and with the footage, he wants the audience to see what was so unique about the Doors, their strange appeal as rock figures unlike anyone else at the time; there were other hippie-rock bands, and other poets, and other blues bands, but not quite in this combination.

For the newcomers, the documentary basically tells you everything you need to know, or would care to know, about Jim Morrison and the Doors. I mention his name first because, as a liability with the documentary for fans, it doesn't really go that much into the other members' lives at the time. Perhaps DiCillo saw that not a lot of interest was really there with Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore (comparatively to Jim, the documentary might tell us, they were very much normal, save for trading off from acid to meditation), or that Morrison is such a dynamic figure- an icon to some, just another wasted rocker to others- that he'd have to take up the screen time. A similar issue could be taken with Oliver Stone's bio-pic - on the other hand, as the film makes pretty clear, after Morrison died, the Doors were practically bust (the doc fails to mention that the band actually *did* go on to make a couple of albums in the 70's, both huge flops, and cynically tour a few years ago as "The 21st Century Doors", but I digress).

An issue can be taken with nothing too new being given to us historically about the band, and (more-so) that DiCillo frames it into the history we've seen so often: tumultuous times, upheaval of society, Johnson and Nixon's Vietnam and domestic policies, Kennedy and MLK assassinations and Charles Manson and Kent etc etc. But what works best is when we can focus on the band as a whole, what made them different, how they somehow gelled together as equal parts blues, poetry, psychedelia, jazz, rock, whatever, in how they approached the songs (no bass player for one thing) and how they recorded tracks. One of the more fascinating aspects is hearing how long the creative process took; their best albums took mere days to record (self-titled debut and LA Woman) while a mixed-bag of pop-tunes like The Soft Parade took nearly a year.

And in the middle, like a vortex of leather and hair and strikingly handsome (or as some might say "Hawt") lead figure, Jim Morrison takes up a lot of the airtime. He's an intriguing, baffling figure, how a man with such talent and natural charisma, as a singer and a writer, felt insecure about himself and also became "Jimbo" as Manzarek called him, a wild alter-ego on stage that made a split between those who wanted the Doors, and those that wanted to spectacle of "JIM". He doesn't come off too well as a person ultimately, as a philanderer and alcoholic and sometimes just cruel person... but at the end of it all, his creative output with the Doors in a few years amounted to more than some rock bands can get in decades of work. Again, this is nothing too new to realize, and some of the big facts are so well covered as to be like pop-legend. But DiCillo does a thorough job putting it altogether, and, substantively (if not as a visionary experience) it trumps Stone's film.

Well, being a huge fan, knowing quite a lot of people in the Doors (full) circle and having been everywhere from Pere Lachaise to Rothdell Trail to Fairhaven Memorial... I have to say I did turn this on with a slight sense of anxiousness as to whether it would be another destruction of James Douglas Morrison's entire character as both the Oliver Stone horrorshow and the numerous vacuous "rockumentataries" have done.

However, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised in the main. If you're a hardcore Doors fan then despite the claims of previously unseen footage, you will have seen most of this, few people have been to Paris without bumping into the likes of Rainer Moddeman and other well connected superfans and blagging bootleg stuff and HWY and Feast of Friends have been pretty easy to secure for a long time now as have tapes of Critique etc. But, I was quite impressed with what Tom Dicillo did with the footage, not only was he sympathetic and judicious with it but he accented the narrative with it almost as good as Densmore accented anything Jim did. Clearly, for the eagle eyed, he used footage from other events to underscore a point on an entirely different event but that's just me being picky - ultimately, there is a finite amount of footage that could be trawled. He avoided a lot of the glaring pitfalls one could easily make in such a documentary - for example he didn't get too caught in the trap of juxtaposing events in the 60's with the events of the Doors (there was some of this but it was measured and relevant) and I thought Depp was okay with his voice-over although he was a little dour and the script was at times a little prescriptive and compartmentalised. I do however appreciate that the film has to be appeal to more than the hardcore afficianados and that a balance has to be struck so I think the film really does work well both for those who only have a loose interest in The Doors (or even those just interested in the era) and those more fanatical about The Doors.

I know that Ray (at least) backed this film vocally which gives it credibility from the get go and I you have to give the guy credit for using only original footage. That said, this probably reduces the "filmmaking" to that of an editor so I don't want to be too gushing but still, give the guy his due, the end product is enjoyable, reasonably balanced, it maintained interest and it definitely had some nice touches in it which as I said derived from clever use of the stock material. It wasn't just the choice of footage; it was the more the way it was deployed and paced.

Maybe if budget (or sensibilities) had allowed, the film could have encompassed some other original footage (or other stock footage even) for those Doors fans who want to learn more about the Doors landmarks - be it shots of Venice beach or Rue Beautreillis but what I am glad of is the fact that they stayed well away from including interviews with the usual crowd like Grace Slick etc. which I think would have corrupted the output.

I'll watch it (and review it) sober again and see whether I feel the same but all in all, to quote the Velvet Menace himself, "pretty good, pretty good, pretty neat, pretty neat".