A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, September 13, 2026

The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Meg Ryan and Val Kilmer in The Doors

Cast: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan, Michael Wincott, Michael Madsen, Josh Evans, Dennis Burkley, Billy Idol, Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman. Screenplay: Randall Jahnson, Oliver Stone. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: David Brenner, Joe Hutshing. 

Oliver Stone's hyperactive The Doors does exactly what you might expect of a biopic of one of rock's live fast, die young legends. It never gives us a moment to think about what Jim Morrison might really have been like when he wasn't performing. It treats him as what he has become: an emblem of the mad era when the '60s were becoming the '70s, when to be young was to be performative. Stone montages the political and social background with clips of riots and assassinations, but despite a committed and compelling performance by Val Kilmer, Morrison ends up as a figure flailing in a sea of clichés. There's even a mystical shaman figure to represent the pseudo-spiritual side of Morrison's experimentation with psychoactive drugs. If you want music, there's plenty of it. If you want insight into the life and times of Jim Morrison, go elsewhere.

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