The Doors (1991) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

• Many of the negatives you read about the film suggest that it is pretentious and obsessive.
• Many women and family values types don't like it because of lines like "father I want to kill you, mother I want to fuck you".
• Some don't like it because there is no redemption as in the typical entertainment biopic - things just kept getting worse and worse for Jim.
• Some don't like it because it's really about death - Morrison was obsessed with death, coveted "the other side" and finally got what he wanted while he was still young enough to enjoy it.
• Some criticize the fact that the film changes the character of Jim's girlfriend or of the other Doors when it suits convenient storytelling.
• Others don't like it because they didn't like the sixties, or they don't like The Doors, or something.

I think if you stand back from this film and try to view it objectively, you'll find:

• It does a great job of showing what it was like in that time, how the drug-addled whirlwind seemed to turn a shirtless surfer boy with a book of sophomoric poetry into a cultural icon overnight.
• It does a great job of showing what Morrison and his music were like. Val Kilmer just nailed the role. I think he is Jim Morrison, and somebody else is in that grave in Paris. All the crap about the Indian Shaman, and the spoken word songs, and the cobras in the desert, that wasn't Oliver Stone's fictionalization, but real Morrison, a part you never saw if "Light My Fire" was the limit of your personal Doors experience. Oliver was telling it like it was.
• You really get the feeling of being there at those small live indoor performances, and later at the mega-events. Oliver Stone knows how to create the drug-and-concert "experience" on film with all of his hallucinatory sensory-overload filmmaking. It was especially impressive on the big screen.

Roger Ebert wrote, and quite accurately I think, that watching this movie is like being stuck in a conversation with an obnoxious drunk when you're not drinking.

But mostly I hate the movie because I don't like remembering how fucked up everything got when the whole peace and love and poetry and social justice thing turned into nothing more than a series of symbols to market bad rock albums and drugs and black light posters. And Morrison was a perfect symbol for that degeneration.

I read with amusement the comments at IMDb claiming that Jim was so much more than shown in the movie, so deep, so sensitive, so much more than a childish drug-abusing jerk. Oh, fiddle-faddle.

First of all, although Jim had an exceptionally high IQ, his poetry is awful. Your kid sister's book of poems is just as good as Jimbo's. Of course, being a bad poet is a real liability when your career ambition is to become a poet, but is actually a plus if you want to be a Rock God. Jim was so smart that he might have developed into a real writer - if he had spent 20 sober years reading every major work of world literature and gradually perfecting his craft. But a 20 year old guy who stays stoned 24/7 isn't likely to become James Joyce. Even James Joyce took a long time to become James Joyce.

Ray Manzarek (Door's keyboard) has said that the film isn't a good history of The Doors. Doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter that the Meg Ryan role bore no resemblance to reality. I've pointed out before that the facts often get in the way of the greater truth. This movie isn't about facts, but experience. You can get the facts out of a history book, but if you want to know what the experience was like, this movie shows you exactly what it felt like to be there in the wretched excess of the time, and the even more wretched excess of Jim Morrison.