“ZAPPA” My rating: B
129 minutes | No MPAA rating
Alex Winter’s “Zappa” is the first film about the iconoclastic musician to have access to its late subject’s vault of never-released tapes, performance videos, home movies and personal correspondence.
Fans of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (present company included) will have plenty to drool over here.
But “Zappa” left me only partially satisfied. The film chronicles Zappa’s life from suburban teen to his death of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52. There are lots of juicy details I didn’t know about.
At the same time, “Zappa” is very much about the man, not his music. Sure, there are snippets of Zappa in performance, snatches of his songs on the soundtrack, but the overriding emphasis here is on the man’s personal story.
And — perhaps it’s because director Winter (yes, the guy who stars opposite Keanu Reeves in the “Bill & Ted” franchise) worked so closely with Zappa’s late widow and executor Gail Zappa in mining the treasure trove — the film often borders on hagiography.
Would Frank have wanted that?
Whatever. “Zappa” makes the case that Francis Vincent Zappa was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable and accomplished musicians, a guy whose career spanned doo-wop, r&b, rock, jazz and classical idioms, all the while dishing vicious satire against the phoniness he saw all around him: politicians, Flower Power, censorship, consumerism, drug abuse.
Zappa’s father was a chemist who worked in a defense plant producing nerve gas; everyone in the neighborhood was required to have gas masks close at hand in case of a leak. Small wonder that gas masks crept into Zappa’s work as an adult.
The teenage Frank dabbled in homemade explosives. His life turned around when he was turned on to a recording by the atonal composer Edgard Varese. His first band took heat because it was racially integrated.
Frank’s first artistic love was film editing; the doc chronicles a bizarre passage in which young Frank was entrapped into making a “porn” movie (it was a total goof; there was nothing overtly sexual in it), resulting in a criminal conviction.
Butler's Cinema Scene 