Finding the Funk: Film Review

AUSTIN — A danceable doc that spends productive time discussing a handful of immortal artists and the grooves they produced, Nelson George's Finding the Funk offers just enough of the good stuff to make viewers who know something about the music wish it did more. Adequate for TV play but hardly the definitive exploration one hopes for given the talent involved, it's enough to send viewers off in search of funk's more obscure pioneers.

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George, a former Billboard editor who has covered much cultural ground since his 1980's stint there, recruits Ahmir Questlove Thompson of The Roots as narrator, suggesting that this hippest of hip-hop innovators had a level of creative involvement that, given the ground covered here, seems unlikely: Though the film mentions some obscure artists and explores the Dayton, Ohio, music scene for longer than expected, its overall syllabus could have been penned by any fan who's not done much more than listen to oldies radio or plugged "P-Funk" into Pandora.

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Which is to say that, grace notes and bonus beats aside, we go from godfather James Brown to Sly Stone, slide from the Ohio Players to Parliament/Funkadelic, and wind up at Prince and the eventual hip-hop rediscovery of by-then unfashionable artists. The movie is smart to acknowledge pre-JB applications of the word "funk" to music -- Horace Silver and other jazz players had a flavor demanding new slang -- but is less informative on the other end of the timeline, spending time name-checking global genres and irrelevant rock acts (must we muddy this gene pool with Phish?) that could be better used on one more story about Brown's methods as a bandleader.

Or (to make the most obvious complaint) on performance footage. Though the film works audio and plenty of vintage pix into the mix, it's so in love with talking heads (some of whom, like D'Angelo and bassist Marcus Miller, are surprisingly insightful) that it neglects to show us funk bands in action. That's particularly puzzling given its association with VH1's Rock Docs; the TV connection does, however, explain the presence of distracting and sometimes inane bits of onscreen trivia dubbed "Funk Chunks."

Production Company: Finding the Funk Productions

Director-Screenwriter: Nelson George

Producers: Leslie Norville, Nelson George

Executive producers: Arthur Baker, Nelson George

Director of photography: Cliff Charles

Editor: Kevin J. Custer

No rating, 76 minutes