Film Review - Amy (2015)

Amy is the newest documentary by Asif Kapadia who made the outstanding 2011 documentary on Ayrton Senna but this time his subject is the late Amy Winehouse who started out as a Jazz musician but then with Back in Black became a huge star but this came at a very tragic price.

Before watching it I was pretty nervous mainly because Senna was a real game changer for me in terms of documentary films being more than just talking heads and footage but something that could have the feeling of seeing a film in terms of it being exciting, emotional and larger than life but could Amy which is a very different tale than Senna be a worthy follow up?

Absolutely it is but for entirely different reasons and those reasons are:

- Firstly the doco is beautifully structured with almost all of the first half of the story being from her days as a Jazz singer and the film has this very bright and optimistic kind of feel to it even though you know the storm of her last few years is coming like a thunderstorm on the horizon but even still when that storm does hit you are still unprepared for the emotional impact it will leave (there were a couple of times where I felt tears in my eyes) and I remember a lot of that press coverage of her from the time and still I felt very emotional.

- The second is that the doco expertly paints a picture of our celebrity culture which from a young age we are almost pre programmed to love and/or worship these sort of celebrity figures be they singers/songwriters, actors, athletes or directors just to name 4 examples and it is fuelled to some extent even just by looking at a picture of them or watching/listening to some of their work and over the last 10 years I feel it has seeped deeply into so much of our news.

And I mean this in both how it is reported as well as how we receive it be it in politics or sport or daily information or even variety shows and websites we read and watch during our day and what this doco did so well was that how this culture becomes like a storm to go back to that analogy in that it can be destructive as well as causing misery and pain for almost everyone involved.

The doco also has its suspects as to what caused all of this but I think that one is also free to be able to make up their own mind on this but I must also say that perhaps all of us must also share some responsibility in what happened given our love of celebrity culture which I explained above.

Watching Amy is very very emotional and delivered the goods, highly recommend especially if you loved Senna but this is a very different doco than that one and should not be judged in comparison but all I will say is that Kapadia is 2 for 2, 4 out of 5.