Film review: Amy
The story of Amy Winehouse runs like most others at the highest levels of the music industry, and we have seen it many times before: music and drugs, fame and fortune, life and death. In the documentary film Amy, we get a slightly different perspective on this particular jazz-pop icon’s trajectory in that most of the film comprises behind-the-scenes footage shot on home video cameras, but there are no significant departures from our prior knowledge through the mass media or rudimentary guesswork.
Director Asif Kapadia, who was responsible for one of the most gripping documentary films of the past decade with his look at the career of another iconic individual who died too early, Formula One driver Ayrton Senna in Senna, has assembled an enormous amount of film dating at least to 1998, as well as numerous excerpts of dialogue, voice messages and interviews to produce his look at Winehouse. The end result is much less entertaining that the artist herself, but it does presents us with a picture of someone who, by all accounts, was just a nice girl with a unique voice but could not handle the sudden pressures of global fame.
For the full movie review, please visit The Prague Post.
