Quilt wrote:
Frank was a great musician/composer. In that medium he excelled.
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Uncle Meat is extremely amateur in the way it is put together. The 'plot'/storyline/narrative/whatever is risible, or at least it was beyond my definition of entertainment. I am a huge Zappa fan but I don't believe everything he put out, some music included, was particularly good, and I refuse to distort my own definition of what is 'good' or 'worthwhile' just so I can appreciate the value of this motion picture/experiment.
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Agreed.
I probably am one of the very few film reviewers that gave that film a good review, specially at a time when it was kewl to trash it, and say some other Hollywood jackoff film is more valuable or important, simply because it made money and is "famous".
And this creates a problem. Your perception and mine!
If you happen to catch, let's say, 5 or 6 of the early Godard films, where he is vehement about making fun of Hollywood conventions for film, you end up finding one thing. Godard can be annoying as heck, and he is playing with your perception. You and I are so used to seeing this and that, that we can not even compare it to your perception or mine in a similar situation, but you accept Jack Sparrow's or a shot from the daily shows as important because they made this or that person famous, and that show gets used everywhere now.
In the end, the shot of the camera moving from left to right while the two lovers are having their discussion on the bar stools, is annoying as heck ... but you and I would probably be looking elsewhere or talking to someone else, and not give a damn about those two and their conversation anyway, if this was "not" a film!
Likewise, Godard throws music and visuals all over the place on purpose.
You can see more of this in a wonderful film that won an Oscar about cinematographers, called "Visions of Light" ... worth having in your collection, but take a look at what inspires and how it is done sometimes! ...
Now, the issue is ... does anyone do this with music? The answer is NO. On top of it, when you read many of the comments in this board ... there are many people that want the rock Frank and the jazz Frank ... and you and I know that he had an independent streak and this is what Varese and so many others mean to Frank, that means aboslutely nothing and total shit to most of us that even listen to music ... how many of us even have a Varese album? Or can say that we listened to it with a fair ear?
It was a time that allowed for that expression and experimentation ... and that is the most important part of it all ... and many people -- I call them how socialistic of them to think so! to nag at them! -- are not comfortable with the free form stuff, the different stuff, the totally off the wall stuff ... which sometimes includes nothing of meaning on purpose, because we are expecting that kiss to bring the movie audience an OHHHHHHHHHHH to last for 5 minutes so all the girls will come back and see it again!
This was what the whole artistic thing had been about, at least as far as the "surrealists" in 1930's with Bretton, Dali, Bunuel and others, which America did not see a lot of because of the depression. And the 60's, with all its drugs and what not, had a lot of that free form spirit, where sometimes it was more important to get out of the "comfort zone" than it was to see something different.
200 Motels is very good. If anything, it is the real representation of a time that was trying to find its way, and Frank knew that the "commercial" way was not it. But here we are, and compare the work to anything that is/was commercial, and the end result is? ... it will always be bad, because no one gets it and no one knows what it is about.
I look at it, as an attempt to do in film the same thing that he was doing in music ... turn it upside down and see what you got. The only sad thing about it is that most folks, even today, are only interested in the guitar god and they couldn't careless about the composer and the one person in rock music that actually made an effort at doing something else and hoped to come up with something new and something different.
This is my appreciation of Frank ... I couldn't careless for the release of the Roxy stuff or any more of the Overnight stuff, because in the end, all it is doing is glorify the rock hero guy, not the totality of who Frank was. I think the sale of the rock star is limited in time. The sale of the artist and his total work? Forever!
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Maybe you had to be there to get into the spirit of it all.
Best wishes
Not really. There is nothing in that time that you can't have today or not do. With one exception! And it is a major one! Music, then had an independent spirit and it was independent. Today, the only independence is commercialism done with the left index finger instead of the right index finger! And we're way too influenced by the popular music and top ten, to appreciate the rest.
My apologies for the length, but now you know why so many of the big Hollywood names in film are not in my list. The only one I would put in there in the last 50 years, is Sam Peckinpah, and that one is almost for one film alone, and the best western ever made in my book ... The Wild Bunch! After that it became violence en grace and gratis! I didn't need Dustin Hoffman to tell me why or justify it, either!
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