In her short career, Amy Winehouse stunned the music world as a genius-level jazz vocalist and natural-born songwriter. She was an artist of massive wattage—a feisty North Londoner with a smart mouth and a fragile heart.
In the devastating documentary Amy, director Asif Kapadia tells the story of Winehouse’s tilt-a-whirl life and sudden, tragic death. The approach is simple and direct. Voiceover interviews with friends and family are fused with archival images, performance footage and handheld video. Every combination of sound and picture is composed to bring us viscerally into Winehouse’s world.
Kapadia and his producers managed to secure amazing access for their film. Childhood friends and Winehouse’s first manager, Nick Shymansky, provided hours of candid home-movie style video footage. The first half of the documentary is flat-out fascinating if you’re interested in Winehouse’s artistry and incredible music.
We see her performing in small clubs as a young singer on the London jazz scene and working with her producer, Salaam Remi, on new songs. Even as a teenager, her sophistication with melody and phrasing seems almost supernatural. Later, we watch her skills as a songwriter and lyricist emerge. The melodies may be sad, she says, “but I always put a punch line in the song.”
That’s exactly right, although they were invariably gut punches. Winehouse’s Grammy-winning breakthrough album, Back to Black, is a masterpiece—an aching study of the love song as a bloody wound.
I could have watched the first half of Amy for another 12 hours, but inevitably, the film turns toward a profile of the Winehouse of the tabloid era. The second half follows the singer through rehab stints, public humiliations and a lethally toxic marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced her to heroin and crack cocaine.
As the death spiral accelerates, Kapadia stitches together home movies with tabloid news reports and increasingly infrequent concert appearances. Many scenes are hard on the stomach. In one freeze frame, we see in Winehouse’s eyes the raw, demonic hunger of her addictions. The filmmakers hold the image for an excruciating interval. It’s one of the most disturbing compositions I’ve ever seen.
The documentary presents everything at an artistic remove, with implicit critiques of media and society. But it still trades in ghoulish tabloid imagery, and it still feels awful. We already watched Winehouse die in public. Watching it again, in close-up, is painful.
Amy is an intimate and profoundly sad chronicle of an artist chopped down in her prime by fame, disease and personal demons. It’s a tremendously powerful film, but one that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend seeing—not if you ever loved Winehouse through her music. I had the strangest sensation after watching Amy: I admired it very much and wished I’d never seen it at all.
Jurassic World and Inside Out show that digital wizardry can’t shine without smarts and heart
July 7, 2015
When the original Jurassic Park hit theaters in 1993, it was blockbuster movie-making done right. The special effects were like nothing we’d ever seen, and director Steven Spielberg—the planet’s leading expert in this sort of thing—provided humor and heart along with all the shock and awe.
Twenty-two years and several sequels later, the operation has fossilized into JURASSIC WORLD, in which only the tradition of dazzling digital effects remains. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard play the odd-couple leads—he’s loose, she’s uptight—and a couple of bland kids are put in peril as dinosaurs once again run amok.
The dinosaur action scenes are fun, especially on the big screen (with the big sound), and director Colin Trevorrow stages a few effective sequences featuring a kind of human hamster ball vehicle. But the rest of the movie is an assembly-line franchise endeavor, with phony emotional swells, dumbed-down dialogue and relentless product placement. The makers of Jurassic World don’t think much of their audience, and it shows.
Happily, we have the perfect summer movie antidote with INSIDE OUT, the 15th animated feature film from Pixar, maybe the single most reliable entity in the entertainment industry.
Audacious and overflowing with ideas, Inside Out tells the story of 11-year-old Riley and the five color-coded Emotions that live in her head—golden Joy (Amy Poehler), blue Sadness (Phyllis Smith), purple Fear (Bill Hader), red Anger (Lewis Black) and green Disgust (Mindy Kaling).
Director Pete Docter creates a visual extravaganza inside Riley’s mind, where emotional traumas are seismic events and memories are stored in bright orbs. Joy and Sadness team up to navigate Riley’s crises by journeying—via the Train of Thought—to notional nooks such as Imagination Land, the scary Subconscious and the under-construction realm of Abstract Thought. (Riley’s just 11, after all.)
The story delivers a parade of delightful concepts—how facts and opinions get mixed up; how brain freeze works—with humor, goofiness and the kind of emotional intelligence we’ve come to expect from Pixar. The filmmakers clearly like and respect their audience. And it shows.
Together, Jurassic World and Inside Out present a fascinating contrast. Both are big-budget summer tentpole movies, aiming to please. But as actual filmgoing experiences, they couldn’t be more different. Jurassic feels like a product assembled by skilled merchants. Inside Out feels like a creation shared by inspired artists. My suggestion: Skip the former and see the latter twice.
This article appeared in print with the headline “Claws and Effects.”
Glenn McDonald 