This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 18, 2010 - Coming Back For More
Seminal funk singer-bandleader Sly Stone, whose public career lasted only a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, still managed to influence Miles Davis, Prince and David Bowie, among others. His band, the Family Stone, mixed white and black and male and female musicians, unusual at the time, and the family was notable for the sheer fun it seemed to be having celebrating diversity and a heavy bass backbeat.
Then Sly virtually disappeared for more than 30 years. He has surfaced occasionally, still sounding good and looking like no one else. Most recently, on his rare public appearances, he has been spotted with a silver-white Mohawk thinner than a windowpane and taller than a top hat.
For what appears to be several years, Dutch filmmaker Willem Alkema and two friends from the Netherlands - twin brothers who apparently have devoted much of their lives to Sly -- prowled the hills around Los Angeles looking for Stone, comically just missing him time after time. And then. . .
"Coming Back for More" tells the alternately happy and sad story of Sly Stone, who was years ahead of his time and then ran headlong, like many musicians, into problems with drugs, women and money. Yet amid it all, he had the high spirits to name one of his daughters "Phunne." The documentary, engagingly disjointed, is also an amusing study of the helpless sort of obsession that can afflict fans of pop culture, particularly Europeans bedazzled by the trash and glitter of America.
- By Harper Barnes
The Wind Journeys
This haunting movie successfully presents two disparate traditions: The story of a musician who receives his instrument from the Devil himself, combined with the legendary master who refuses to take on an unstoppable young disciple.
If you admire the legend of Robert Johnson meeting the Devil at the crossroads, you may get some similar chills watching this analogous story set in South American backcountry.
All of it happens in scruffy Colombian towns and deep mountains and seascapes where Ignacio Carrillo (Marciano Martinez) travels with a bewitched accordion that has two black horns (a bull's? the Devil's?) protruding from the front. Ignacio just wants to return the dangerous thing to the master who gave it to him. The accordion has pretty well taken over and nearly destroyed Ignacio's life, and he tries desperately to keep from playing it or letting it play him.
But he is relentlessly pursued by Fermin (Yuli Nunez), a boy musician, who simply will not give up asking to be taught how to play. The boy is willing to go through baptism in blood and even death.
This movie is not particularly "accessible," so be prepared for lots of silent walking in luridly colored landscapes and long inscrutable conversations of few words, intermingled with bouts of raw life in South American villages where cockfighting and accordion duels are big events. Also, a cup of coffee beforehand might help. Still, the movie works, at least for me.
Unless you happened to come across Chen Kaige's "Life on a String" from China back in 1991, you probably haven't seen anything quite like "The Wind Journeys." Give it a try if you are willing to concede that sometimes the inscrutable is its own reward.
-- Reviewed by Nick Otten