Direction: Alex Winter
Country: USA
This documentary about the American rock star Frank Zappa is moderately fluid as well as competently organized and edited, but don’t expect much insight about the compositions and the music itself. Above all, one catches wind of the peculiar personality and activism of a perfectionist workaholic whose complex ideas had never stopped coming in torrents.
His unusual approach and love for unorthodox music (Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky) established high standards for the other musicians to perform, a stunning fact considering that he was a self-taught composer and instrumentalist. The constant financial struggle never dissuaded him from doing his own thing, rather making him the first artist to go completely independent as he was only interested in quality work, not commercial success.
Controversial enough, Zappa was a prominent figure in the defense of musicians’ rights against censorship and was idolized in Czechoslovakia, where he was appointed Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism by president Vaclav Havel.
The film, directed by Alex Winter (The Panama Papers), is jam-packed with information and stressed to the limit, but a closer look at the course of events makes us conclude that a trim would not be viable without jeopardizing the outcome. The unflashy exposition includes appearances of people who were close to him - his wife Gail Zappa and musical collaborators Mike Keneally, Steve Vai, Alice Cooper, Ian and Ruth Underwood among them - and ends with Zappa’s memorable last concert with the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern, an orchestral collaboration immortalized with the album The Yellow Shark in 1993.
Zappa fans won’t want to miss this.
