Winehouse makes film about Amy

I only met British singer Amy Winehouse once…some seven or eight year ago, backstage at the Grammy Awards here in Los Angeles. Every time Amy sings, the mood lifts. This isn’t another episode of “Behind the Music”.

However, I also don’t believe we would be talking about her if she did not have the problems that made her a notorious pop culture figure. Still, she says she “started writing music to challenge myself”, like James Taylor and Carole King, whom she admired. And you can hear it in her music.

Producer Mark Ronson said of her: “We have this stereotype of young Mozart”. Winehouse’s talent was sadly overshadowed by her drug habits. What is not in doubt is that by the time Londoner Amy moved into her own fl at aged 19 she was an unstable force of nature. A more stable person may have been able to resist this exploitation, but as she herself said, she just couldn’t “handle it”. No one wants to blame the deceased for dying, and that’s where this documentary succeeds in particular. Another problematic relationship: that of Amy and her once estranged father, Mitch.

Mitch Winehouse, the father of the late Amy Winehouse, is so upset by the Asif Kapadia-directed documentary Amy that he’s determined to make his own film about his daughter. “Amy is a film about love”. But others were fans of hers until her dying day, and still others watched her antics as if they were driving past a horrific accident.

Mitch Winehouse said Kapadia’s film failed to understand “the nature of addiction”.

Amy is released in cinemas on July 3.

He adds, “I liked her live performances much better than the records”. Half way through the song, I forgot the words and froze as the accompanist kept playing those bleating chords on the piano. By the end of the film I felt intimately involved with her life…and death…and I was emotionally drained. I have mental illness in my family. The whole experience was a complete disaster. “It’s not trying in any way to try and point a finger at any single person”. The irony is extremely bleak.

A singer of remarkable talent – her last recording was a magical duet with her idol, Tony Bennett – Winehouse’s erratic, drug-addled ways threatened to overshadow her image (videos of her being booed off the stage in Belgrade, too drunk to sing, spring to mind). Arguably Kapadia’s greatest achievement is to be return to us the Amy Winehouse that Bennett saw – not the tragic victim, but the amusing, sassy young woman with the God-given voice.

All the while, Amy-teetering in heels, her black hair piled high on her head, her punk-glam makeup thick and smeared-comes across as shy but fiercely smart and amusing, defiantly antiestablishment, and never fully recovered from her parents’ divorce, which gave her a vulnerability, a constant need for love and approval. It could even be that the music she left behind has such an eternal feel. That’s what makes her public decline, brutally recorded by the media, so gut-wrenching. He turned her on to soft (cocaine) and then hard (heroin) drugs.

He just wanted to tell Amy Winehouse’s story. The film puts her story up for intellectual property.

Previous year Channing Tatum starred in one of the most enjoyable sequels of the summer, 22 Jump Street.

“Nick came in to the editing suite”, Kapadia says, “and we had a lot of dates up on the wall, like in a cop movie”. Nobody else in his family was involved in the creative world, says Kapadia, “And I got into it accidentally”.