I’ve come around on Oliver Stone. I’m not a fan of Platoon, nor Born on the Fourth of July, but he is more than just the Stanley Kramer of his/our generation. He lacks subtlety at times, and his earnestness is his greatest weakness, but the man knows how to direct, of that there is no doubt. But he is helped immeasurably by Robert Richardson, his DP for a good long stretch of his career. Even when the films are less than (say, U-Turn), on  technical level, he’s hard to argue with. He’s always interesting.

And so I struggle with The Doors. On one hand there’s Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison. The performance is one of those “is” moments. It’s the single greatest work in his career (besides Top Secret and Real Genius), while you also have Kyle Maclachlan as Ray Manzerek, with Frank Whaley as Robby Krieger and Kevin Dillion as john Densmore. They’re a great foursome, with all doing excellent work. You’ve got Crispin Glover’s Andy Warhol, and Kathleen Quinlan’s free performance as Patricia Kennealy, the wiccan wife he takes partly as a goof. And you have Michael Madsen as tom Baker, a Joe Dallesandro stand-in. And, of course, the always excellent Michael Wincott as Paul Rothchild. You’ve got Richardson’s cinematography, which on Blu-Ray looks better than ever. The images are excellent.

Then you have Stone’s Indian fetish, which ties into Morrison, but also seems to be meaningful to Stone as well. You’ve got meg Ryan, painfully miscast as Jim’s girlfriend/wife/junkie Pamela, who seems embarrassed to be naked, and doesn’t seem at all to fit into the whole. And you’ve still got the bio-pic format for someone that Dennis Leary described as "I'm drunk, I'm nobody. I'm drunk, I'm famous. I'm drunk, I'm dead." That’s all true, but Stone also has the period, to which (again…) he works in his Vietnam fascinations in ways that feel more grafted.

But, as awkward and earnest and trying too hard as the film may be, it’s got a fucking great soundtrack. Kicking off with “Riders on the Storm” and concluding with “L.A. Woman” it’s got most of the great Doors songs in it, and though personally I’m kinda done with band as a whole, taken in the film, the songs just keep kicking ass as a mélange, and it plays similar to Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense as a tour de force of a group. Though not as well, of course. I hate to use the word undeniable, as the film is really deniable, it’s filled with faults, but the whole package, as full of shit as it is, is hard to resist.

Lionsgate presents the film in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and in DTS Lossless 7.1 surround. As they say, the film should be watched as loud as humanly possible, and my god does this disc rock. Better than all of the previous laserdisc and DVD version, this is the definitive release of this film. The film comes with a commentary by Oliver Stone, which is thoughtful, but this is not Stone’s best subject.

The supplemental material is all old, but worth a look. “Jim Morrison: An American Poet in Paris” (52 min.)  talks to the end of Morrison’s life, and his French friends in his years of exile. “The Road to Excess” (38 min.) was done for the laserdisc SE, but has the single greatest quote about a making of a movie (by Frank Whaley) that has ever been committed to a special feature.  There’s 44 minutes of fourteen Deleted Scenes  with an introduction, but all have been well cut in this nearly bloated bio-pic, while “The Doors in LA” (19 min.)  assesses the scene from which the musicians emerged. There’s also a period featurette (6 min.) that says little and bonus trailers.