One thing seemed abundantly clear after Tom DiCillo’s Sundance premiere of his Doors documentary, “When You’re Strange”: the narration sucked.
Or at least to discerning, but cranky critic Jeffrey Wells it did. He enjoyed the doc about the ’60s acid rockers and Jim Morrison, but complained. “It’s stymied time and again by DiCillo’s trite narration. And I mean ‘give me a fucking break’ trite. I began to go crazy listening to DiCillo’s litany of pat cliches,” Wells fumed. “It’s not that the narration gets it ‘wrong’ per se, but it makes one of the most electric and tumultuous times in American history sound so damn tidy and sorted out…almost vanilla.”
Wells can be a little manic at times, but his observations are not only spot-on and more importantly: people listen. So it’s not a total surprise that DiCillo’s self-read narration is being jettisoned in favor of one voiced by Johnny Depp according to Deadline Hollywood who got the early scoop.
Wells should put that his his win column. Depp previously narrated the Hunter S. Thompson documentary, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” but even he couldn’t save that artless and on-the-nose hagiography.
