Word: morrisons
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Popular music would not be the same without the influence of Van Morrison, the social consciousness of U2, or the refreshing, if controversial, frankness of Sinead O'Connor...
...Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison's grave site pulls in the biggest crowds: pilgrims, rockophiles, ragged hippies who look as if they stepped out of a Woodstock Portosan 20 years too late. Last spring, while Oliver Stone's rockudrama on Morrison's group the Doors was still in production, with Val Kilmer in the lead role, one possessive admirer etched this graffito into the Pere-Lachaise headstone: VAL KILMER...
...scrawler was right. Morrison was a gorgeous creature -- face by Michelangelo, a mouth made for pouts and pleasures, his entire persona an erogenous zone -- with an electrifying stage presence. He saw himself, though, as a Romantic poet trapped in a pop star's body and worked hard at punishing that body with all-life binges of alcohol, drugs and heavy sex. "I'm rich and famous, smart and pretty," he must have mused. "Now how can I screw it up?" He did so by speeding up the physical and mental decay that aging forces on mere mortals. Like his hero...
Kilmer is just conventionally good-looking; he can't prowl like Blake's Tyger or pose with the sultry arrogance of a Beat poet. Nor does he have the intellectual seductiveness that made Morrison a toy of the hip literati. In short, Kilmer is not Jim, and his casting denies The Doors the chance to be a meditation on the lure of sexual power. What else can the movie be? Morrison and his band were not political pathfinders, and musically they were close to negligible, with one compelling tune (Light My Fire) and an ambitious, pretentious attitude. The Doors...
...Stone turned The Doors into a display of pop culture's wretched excess. "The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death," Morrison wrote when he was a student at the UCLA film school, and The Doors latches onto this fear in the first scene -- when five-year-old Jim sees a car wreck -- and rides the snake right to the end. In between come dozens of set pieces in which Morrison makes a spectacular, suicidal fool of himself: insulting his audience, trashing hotel rooms, dangling from 10th-story windows, engaging in a blood- sipping ritual with his witchy...