The Doors (1991)
Directed by Oliver Stone
The story of the famous and influential 1960s rock band and its lead singer and composer, Jim Morrison.
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What critics compared The Doors to
And how does it compare to other rock biopics like ‘The Doors,’ ‘The Buddy Holly Story,’ and ‘Last Days’?
But if it doesn’t have the family drama of “Walk the Line” or the psychodrama of “The Doors,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” does deliver what any music biopic must: convincing characters and some kick-butt simulated concert experiences.
The last time I saw it done this well was Oliver Stone's "The Doors" in 1991, starring Val Kilmer as the doomed and drugged-out rock-star icon Jim Morrison.
Missing here is the raw biography of films like “The Doors, “The Rose,” or “Ray,” where the audience gets to know the artist as a flesh and blood, flawed or passionate human expressing him or herself through their craft.
It is on occasion, closer to Spinal Tap than Oliver Stone’s The Doors; a film that comes dangerously close to being entirely constituted from moments that have been retrospectively remade as symbolic or iconic.
The rest of his bandmates are also strong, with Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), and John Deacon (Joe Mazzello) all well-repped, producing a group chemistry vastly better than most such arrangements (for the genre's nadir in this regard, try re-watching Oliver Stone's The Doors , beyond Val Kilmer's performance and see where that lands you).
This is blockbuster horror, a Dateline NBC segment blown out into a catch-all gothic extravaganza that includes references to Iraq and PTSD, the Bronx Zoo as a gateway to hell, a heroin junkie turned über-hip Catholic demonologist, and the deepest consideration of Jim Morrison’s mind-expanding lyrics since Oliver Stone’s The Doors.
Moreover, the pic uses a handful of songs by 60s rock band “The Doors” as part of its storyline, ostensibly because of singer Jim Morrison’s loose connection to the occult.
Homage to westerns, Oliver Stone acid trips in The Doors, 2D classic Disney animation flashbacks via an 80s slasher movie, Stargate and Saving Private Ryan (particularly) had me absolutely cackling.
Before that the film notches some of its greatest self-deprecating wins, namely in that the buff god of thunder, Thor (Chris Hemsworth), some five years after Thanos’ win in Wakanda, is now a potbellied booze bag looking like the portly Val Kilmer, “large mammal” portrayal of the latter-years Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.”
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But even with such gifted creators, brilliant production design and several moments that capture the wobbly sensations of an acid trip better than anything since Oliver Stone's "The Doors," "Fear and Loathing" is disappointing, pointless and repetitive.
They belong to the evil Akan (Danila Kozlovsky)—a telekinetic albino villain in a platinum fright wig who’s probably meant to resemble Andy Warhol but looks more like Crispin Glover playing Andy Warhol in The Doors.
We see N.W.A. rise to success, a massive tour - with some of the best concert recreations since Oliver Stone's fanboy gushfest "The Doors" - and their eventual splintering.
Na trajetória para esta nova colaboração com o ator Ethan Hawke (e com a produtora Blumhouse), disse um “ oi ” ao Universo Marvel com “Doctor Strange” (2016), recusou a sequela, e sugeriu The Doors como a banda do Diabo em “Deliver us from Evil” (2014).
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I didn’t enjoy this film as much as “The Doors,” but Edward Snowden is no Jim Morrison.
And that’s a problem for this filmmaker, somewhat more comfortable with ‘Nam (Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, Heaven & Earth), rock and roll (The Doors), the Kennedy assassination (JFK), serial killers (Natural Born Killers), 9/11 (World Trade Center) and drug-related chainsaw murders (Savages).
(He even visualizes some of the hacks like acid trips from The Doors.)
There is none of the colour and bravura of his other true-life films from JFK to Nixon to W, via The Doors.
Woodley is saddled with a role familiar to fans of Stone’s films: The Woman Who Alternately Supports Her Heroic Man But Also Gets In His Way But Ends Up Being The Moral Compass But Not Until She Has Cried A Lot. (See also: Sissy Spacek in JFK, Kyra Sedgwick in Born on the Fourth of July, Meg Ryan in The Doors, even Joan Allen in Nixon.
Stone, who tends toward volatile male leads — “The Doors”, “Natural Born Killers” — griped during the shoot how hard it was to make a heroic figure out of such a “robot nerd.”
After the hectoring tedium of his 2010 “Wall Street” sequel, it’s a relief to discover that the pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, drugged-up and lunatic Oliver Stone of “U Turn” and “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors” is not gone forever.
He briskly navigates the Elmore Leonard-style twists of the story, and, as he did in films like “Salvador,” “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors,” he transmits his hedonistic pleasure directly to the audience.
From his early directorial outing, 1981's The Hand (Michael Caine loses his appendage, but it comes back, ferociously!), to his 1991 hallucinogenic rock bio The Doors, to his hyperactive homicidal-twosome movie, 1994's Natural Born Killers, Stone has a tendency to inflate what is essentially genre fare with grandiosity, with portentous gab.
"Born on the Fourth of July," "The Doors," "JFK," "Natural Born Killers," "Nixon," "Any Given Sunday"--these were bold, controversial and visionary works produced at a time when such things were generally considered to be the exception to the Hollywood and no matter what you may have thought about the films themselves, it cannot be denied that when you came out of them, you knew that you had just seen a Movie in all its risky glory and not just another inflated television episode of the kind that had begun clogging the multiplexes in greater and greater numbers.