I had a real mixed response to the film. Hard to not love a 2 hour Zappa doc, but to me it felt like they were not totally sure what story they wanted to tell and it became kind of muddled and rushed. Large swaths of time are skipped over and certain topics are approached, looked at and then pretty quickly cast aside. I feel like it really needed another 60-120 minutes to tell the story it wanted to tell. I think a 3-4 episode docuseries would have been a better fit, nothing Ken Burns level, but just allow it the time to complete the narrative. Still, there is so great never before seen footage and some of the footage we know from youtube is far cleaner looking. I don't think I've seen the Yoko/Lennon/Zappa footage so clean and pristine before.
What I did like is that this wasn't just a slavish lauding of Zappa. They acknowledge that he was a complicated individual with some serious character flaws.
They tease a lot of footage and audio that we've never seen or heard such as some unreleased TV performances, and recordings with Captain Beefheart and Clapton. I do hope they continue to release stuff from the vault as they have been doing. I know there are some serious issues going on with the Zappa Family Trust and everything involved with that, but I've been enjoying the boxsets so far. I just hope we get more live material, especially early Mothers and early '78 shows with the Belew, Bozzio, etc crew. I've heard a few boots from that tour and there is some pretty cool stuff from that period we don't have available.
