After over 30 years of waiting, I finally caught this movie on late-night cable. It was definitely not worth the wait. As expected, FZ fanatics will dub virtually anything he did as a "work of genius," but this nasty piece of work is nothing more than a display of self-indulgence. FZ himself stays out of the limelight, using Ringo as his stand-in, but he hovers in the background as a God- or conductor-figure, the mastermind behind the mess. The film is choppy, vulgar, and so dead-weighted by 70s film techniques that it's a laughable look back at how awful entertainment could be in those days. And the band...aargh! Would anyone like to argue that the Turtles could never have made it in show biz after the advent of video? And why does the amazing George Duke waste all his time with a trombone? Zappa was no doubt a musician of talent and insight. For instance, I remember reading an article he wrote in STEREO REVIEW (around this same time) about the music of French avant-garde composer Edgard Varese. And he obviously was acquainted with current orchestral writing techniques (the segments in the film of purely orchestral music are the most durable). But what separates him from true genius is how he wasted his career trying to shock the cultural and religious establishment by being as crude and vulgar as possible. Many "geniuses" have shocked the world, but few if any of them spent their careers reveling in the muck as did Zappa. Genius requires something a bit more exalted than 200 MOTELS.
Review of 200 Motels
