Zappa, Frank - Dan Morgenstern
DAN MORGENSTERN
200 Motels is a very funny, original and entertaining film. It is Frank Zappa's film just as the Mothers are his group, and it is permeated with his personal vision. It is a film of many levels, but his own description, "a surrealistic documentary," is apt.
It deals with life on the road as experienced by a touring rock group, specifically The Mothers, and such real things as sex, food and drink, relationship of performer to audience, getting high, intra-group chemistry, groupies, interviews, etc., but these are not treated in a "realistic" manner….
200 Motels is an "experimental" and offbeat film of a type rarely touched by major studios….
Actual performances by the Mothers (and the Philharmonic) are interspersed with the dramatic sequences, and there is a lot of music in the film, most of it very good….
Throughout, the treatment of sex is direct and funny, striking just the right tone….
I...
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