My Movie Journal is Better Than Yours

Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- Summer of Soul

Notes History

Date Viewed	Venue	Note
11.12.25	Internet	This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2025 AKA The Burden of Black Genius. This is a doc about Sly of Sly and the Family Stone directed by Roots drummer and what-have-you Questlove. I liked his Summer of Soul, I think he did a great job with the SNL50 music doc, and now he goes over Sly's career, ups and downs, typical structure, with mostly archival footage mixed with interviews from prominent black musicians / questlove's friends like Andre 3000, Q-Tip, D'Angelo, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Vernon Reid from Living Colour. I quite like Sly's music but have never done a deep dive or anything. I fell in love with If You Want Me to Stay when it was used in the movie Dead Presidents, fell in love with A Family Affair a little later when I think Ryan played it for me. So this was fun to watch even though it doesn't exactly surprise you with its format. I do think Questlove did a good job assembling and editing this. He's got a great sense of mixing as well, laying in interview snippets over songs, keeping the song's tempo going in the edit, that type of thing. Very solidly made doc. I don't know that you'd love it if you didn't like the music, but that tier of documentary is VERY rare. This is as good as you can reasonably expect. I'm behind already... slacking off too much taking the trash out and making dinner. Let's see if we can squeeze in two more tonight.