200 Motels
1971VOTE NOW
| United Artists | Release Date: November 10, 1971 |
Summary:
The great Frank Zappa's outrageous psychedelic precursor to today's music videos features "The Mothers of Invention" wreaking havoc in a typical American town. Ringo Starr narrates.
Genre(s):
Fantasy, Comedy, Music
Runtime:
98 min
Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]
Thankfully, Zappa was a far better composer than he was a movie director. Whereas the film, with its self-indulgent and incoherent celebrations of drink, drugs and groupies and its tiresomely scatological bent, was largely gale-force gibberish, its sprawling soundtrack, dissonant and atonal but rich in wit and humour, has aged surprisingly well.
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With all the mumbo jumbo of necromancy and visual pyrotechnics, there is little real magic, and in the absence of any central organizing presence, the film needs more of Zappa's punctuating wit. [25 Nov 1971, p.79]
This would be profoundly offensive, if you could tell what was going on. [15 Jun 1992, p.6D]
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