[critical] When You’re Strange

Originally, there are The doors of perception, the book of Aldous Huxley on his experiences of mescaline and other hallucinogenic drugs. The quote from William Blake, who supplied him with the title of this book, also inspired Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek for the name of the group – The Doors – that they founded in 1965 in Venice Beach with John Densmore and Robby Krieger. They were to become one of the most important and most influential american rock.

Author’s Note

[rating:7/10]

• Release Date : June 09, 2010

• Directed by Tom Dicillo

• Film American

• With Johnny Depp, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Roby Krieger

• Duration : 1h30min

• Original title : When You’re Strange

• Trailer :

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There are films like this that have more of a chance than others, in a way that boggles the mind. You do remember, surely not About A son, documentary on Kurt Cobain released in 2008. Its director, Aj Schnack, had dragged on for more than 2 years of festival in festival without finding a person for the distribute, and in the end, when it was released in France, this was done in an indifference related : little promo, distributed in small rooms on the independent circuits. While yet Kurt Cobain is an icon of a generation as it is no longer seen since… Kurt Cobain.

And on the other hand, there are When You’re Strange, the Doors, singer Jim Morrison is the Kurt Cobain of the generation before (schematically), which is released in large pump in the UGC, Pathé and company, distributed by MK2, and we see her beautiful posters sepia spread out in all the corridors of metros de Paname.

About these posters, there may be something a little obscene, and moved to show off as proudly the name of Johnny Depp, giving it the same importance as that of the dir. This is surely a coup with 2 balls to create confusion, but let it be clear once and for all : When You’re Strange is NOT a film with Johnny Depp. All that you will have the beautiful brown in the documentary (because that’s what it is), it is his voice, and only because the director was too rotten. So if you’re a fan of Johnny Depp but not of the Doors, you will be le. Honestly.

Also, and this is also a bit more tragic if you’re a fan of the Doors, you may stay a little hungry, given that we learn nothing new, nothing that we knew already. The archive images are cool, the extracts from shows are well and good, but then that one could be entitled to expect revelations, never-before-seen or never-before-heard, Tom DiCillo (director) is happy to be out of the fridge, stuff that we have already eaten hundreds of times : the drugs, the alcohol, the cops, the descent into Hell of Morrison, his death.

The other hand, if you want to discover the Doors, if you know just their music and that it’s given you an appetite, or even if you believe that Kurt Cobain was the first rock star to be a poet misunderstood, to suffer the drug, and to have conflictual relations with their parents, then this film is a prescription ideal. It is fairly complete, well-documented, well-mounted, the choice of songs and snippets is correct… If it’s hard to find truly transcendent, it was also hard to make him real blame concrete, if not can be a trend a little too extensive for DiCillo to give in to the spectacular and to try to make it even more tragic situations than they already are.

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist of the Doors, which is a type a little nervous at times – because it is not always death -, balance-who wants to hear that When You’re Strange is an ” anti-Oliver Stone “. Because of the film that had achieved the latter in 1991, The Doors. In it, there were actors (Val Kilmer great in the role of Morrison), special effects, psychedelic (LSD, peyote, trips acid in the desert and the ghosts of indians) and a lot of the passages focus on the love life of the singer (barely mentioned in the documentary). Like all biopics, it took a lot of liberties with the real history of the Doors, to give it a more mystical, and give to Jim Morrison seems to be disposed of directly escaped from the asylum.

Only, what that can say about Ray Manzarek, The Doors is a very good film, and in the end the truth is that, left to do things correctly, if you are a bit of perfectionists on the edges, the better it is going to see When You’re Strange, then put down (in DVD bought legally, of course) the film of Oliver Stone in the wake, like that you will really have in your possession all the keys required to understand what were the Doors. Who they were, what their caption, and how they managed to overcome it.