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200 Motels (1971)
8/10
Best taken in small doses, but still good
25 September 2005
Warning: Spoilers
200 Motels predates the personal computer revolution, but Zappa's film contains hundreds of what would now be called Easter eggs. A sample...

* Rance wears a bus driver's hat with three Greek letters on it. They're pronounced as a word, and the word is "fuck."

* After Rance (who is apparently the devil) asks Jimmy Carl Black to sign for a check in blood (he asks the other members of the Mothers to sign for cheeseburgers and beer in blood), Jimmy tells him he's not the devil because "the devil has an English accent."

* Jimmy sings his song "Lonesome Cowboy Burt" in a bar that has a shooting game offering 50 points for shooting a hippie. The Mothers of Invention were arguably all hippies.

* Centerville! A real nice place to raise your kids up! Well, a real nice place to raise your kids up to be stoners--it's the most psychedelic place in the whole 200 Motels universe.

* When Rance was writing Jimmy the check, he asked for the date to put on it. Jimmy thinks out loud, "Monday was the fifth, Tuesday was the seventh..."

* Ringo Starr's discussion of the Naziesque "final solution to the Orchestra Problem."

* And the big finale, "Strictly Genteel," where Rance sings in a powerful bass "Lord have mercy on the people in England, for the terrible food these people must eat, and may the Lord have mercy on the fate of this movie, and God bless the mind of the man in the street."
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The Stuff (1985)
The Power of Advertising (spoilers)
3 February 2003
Warning: Spoilers
This happens every day: You're a guard at a mine when you see a white goop bubbling through the ground. Naturally, the first thing you do is eat some of it. And as naturally, the second thing you do is sell it to other people. Hey, this is America. The Stuff, billed as a cheap horror film, is in reality a parody of the advertising industry--but unlike "Crazy People," which was the same film couched as a comedy, this is a slasher flick. Both films show the power of the advertising industry to make otherwise-rational people do things they otherwise wouldn't do, whether it be eating an unidentifiable product or buying a Jaguar. Paul Sorvino's war-wacky colonel was excellent and...well, what can you say about "Mo' Rutherford and Chocolate Chip Charlie?
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