Vmax

I watch this remarkable visual document every 5 or 6 months to remind me of the visionary powers of this great composer and musician. Frank Zappa attempts to weld together several totally different worlds of artistic behaviour. There's the nice, successful middle of the road stuff, personalized by Starr and Moon. The traditional Classic music is shown and half-ridiculed. The almost always invisible groupie scene plays it's part (no actresses here, only the real girls)like it did as a short lived musical group the GTO's (the true meaning is lost; some say Girls together only or outrageously) Frank even took one of the groupies ( Miss Lucy ?) into his home to play nanny to his children. Last, but not at all least, are the Mothers. I omit the of invention part as this was the idea of the record company to soften the blow to the female part of America's silent majority. It was the beginning of the Flo and Eddie period, which Frank sometimes explained on stage as the result of a famous DJ saying that he could make the Mothers as big as the Turtles. Well, Frank used to say: If you wanna be as big as the Turtles, have a few Turtles in your band. The movies shows in a half hidden and symbolic way the craziness of the world, the moral dilemma's and the influence of religion on the psychological development of mankind. This is the first big step into Zappa's conceptual continuity idea, which sadly ended with his death. The movie is a monument to his genius.

There were several moments through this movie I though about going to sit in the back row, closer to the door. I don't know why. It's cheap, gory, constantly borrowing stuff from other movies, and yet it kept on my mind for days. Sometimes the scenes felt real, like turning on the TV in the middle of a reality piece and wondering if it's extremely bad of extremely real. It sort of scared me, and that's rare. It made me experience claustrophobic tension, which I never felt before.

As almost an oldtimer, having enjoyed the original TV series, I rushed to the theater to remember some of the old feeling. Flawed casting, an unbalanced script, hesitating acting and over-the-top special effects made me grind my teeth in anger and close my eyes tight shut in shame. The plot, the effects, the relations, the triple treason etc all have a distinct smell of the improbable. It has several moments you feel like saying "yeah right" to the screen to indicate what you see is truly and utterly impossible. And as always, that kills the movie. And that's sad.