My gun only registers speeds up to 400 mph!
200 Motels is maxed out, a densely creative and energetic piece of cinema. I've seen it twice now and still don't know all its moves, its curves, its innards.
Lonesome Cowboy Burt: Fine, you can brief me as long as you want, as long as you can tell me two things.
Rance Muhammitz: I know, when do we get paid --
Burt: No, I wanna know where is that waitress --
Muhammitz: Uh-huh, waitress --
Burt: And if she comes in this place, will she sit on my face, and loan me a couple bucks until the end of the week.
Muhammitz: Couple of bucks --
Burt: Heh heh --
Muhammitz: End of the week ... week ending, the week ending, what, what's that, what's the date?
Burt: Uhh, Tuesday was the 5th, uhhh, Monday was the 3rd. Make that out for Sunday --
Muhammitz: Ah ah ah -- don't say Sunday.
Burt: What's wrong with Sunday? The Lord's day.Muhammitz: Ah ah ah --
Burt: A day of rest. Just make that sucker out for the 23rd of March, would ya?
(it should be noted that the quoted scene involves a toy machine gun and a man dressed as a general and a man dressed as a cowboy).
The movie, the first filmed on video, seems like it has no rules, no objectives. Maybe it was an excuse for the music, but as far as excuses go, this one is elaborate, fantastic, and magical.
It fulfills the promise of rock music via the medium of movies. It's a movie for people who want to explore their emotions through art, who want to travel to the anarchic limits of their imagination. If the movie sometimes goes too far, good, good for the movie for going too far, because who are the other filmmakers who are out that far, and doesn't someone got to be?
Mark Volman: The penis can be a very useful organ.
Howard Kaylan: Yeah, very exciting too, once you get to know me.
Crowd: Oh yeah, etc. (mumbles of approval).
Crowd in chorus: PENIS.
Groupie #2: It sounds so overwhelmingly medicinal.
Groupie #1: A penis sounds like something a doctor would have hanging off of him.
Groupie #2: None of the men I know and love in the rock and roll business got penises. They all got cocks or dicks at least.
Conventional and widespread criteria for evaluating a movie's success involves plot and character analysis. The goal is to decode the film's message, which audiences expect to be included, because cinema has become a didactic art form, evidenced by the plethora of children's television and movies, and too the arrangement of dramatic material within general mainstream adult films that treats an adult's mind like a child's. In a popular sense, movies have become an art form of hand holding, and by and large there's a shared DNA among the types of movie seen in the multiplex or rerun on television or imitated by television productions. If one is not careful, one could begin to believe there's a certain way a movie should be, a certain behavior that's suitable or characteristic for the art form.
200 Motel's riches are manifest, but not in what's become the traditional and ubiquitous sense of cinematic riches. 200 Motels is free from the shackles of plot and story, message and didacticism; the movie is a feeling - and a positive feeling! It's an experience of the joys of expansive personality and the thrills of adventurous hearts. It's silly, wacky, wild, and weird, yes, and also passionate, creative, and curious.
Note: 200 Motels was full frame in its original release.
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