Jamie
What is there to say about Back to Black? Nothing, that’s what.
To recap, Amy Winehouse is not yet a star. She’s just a girl that loves singing. Loves playing guitar. Loves her grandma. And yes, she loves drinking. When her demo ends up at Island Records she begins her road to stardom and releases her debut album. But then? Not as much as should happen. They want her to be more pop. She wants to be Amy Winehouse. In an ensuing break she meets Blake at a bar. They start a torrid, messy, on-again, off-again love affair. After things get particularly messy, Blake leaves and Amy is left heartbroken. This is exacerbated by the grief of finding out her grandma is dying of cancer. She channels all this into her second smash hit album Back to Black. In the wake of this success, she gets back together with Blake and they elope. Ultimately this turns tragic when Blake is arrested for assault and Amy is left to deal with her demons on her own. A series of messy, drunken performances ensue. By the time Blake gets out of prison, Amy is a drug addict and he is in recovery and so he asks for a divorce. She spirals even further and eventually admits that she needs to go to rehab. She battles recovery for several years while Blake moves on. Eventually she loses the battle and passes away. THE END.
Before commenting on the actual quality of this film, I think it should be made clear that I am not a particular fan of Amy Winehouse. I have no special connection to her music. It’s good. I remember hearing it when it came out and there were some bops. I also never saw the documentary. I don’t know much about her life and death. I don’t know much about her husband or her dad. Alright… this film is fine. I don’t see what the big hubbub was about. Perfectly middle of the road movie. Some good music. I thought the acting was better than fine. A tragic story. I think everyone comes off poorly, which is mildly amusing as I believe the controversy surrounding it was that it’s too closely connected to the family and so lets them off the hook… so… this is letting them off the hook? Eeesh. Anyway, It’s not particularly good, but there are good things about it. One particularly bad thing about it is that it forces me to take recapping and talking about the film very seriously when this whole enterprise is meant to be a joke. And I don’t like that. I prefer to have a larf.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Oh man, I got a white hot take. But it would be in bad taste, right? Like this is a heat seeking missile. An absolute sizzler. A complete Uno Pizzeria & Grill. If I dropped this scorcher you would think you were in the Scorch Trials. You would take one look at my take and ask where Dante was because you done found yourself in the Inferno. It’s the full body burn of takes. And everyone knows that if you are going to have a full body burn in your movie you may as well have two (you already got the full body burn guy on set). Well guess what? This is the equivalent of a film with three full body burns. I can’t drop it though. Bad taste and all. But if I did… oh ho… watch out! You’d be burnt. Hot Take Temperature: theoretically intense.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me singing my little heart out and just loving bad boys, you know?* Let’s go!
The Good? The singing is quite good. And as a person who has never seen the documentary Amy this was a good excuse to wiki a bunch of stuff about her and get to know something about someone I really didn’t know much about before.
The Bad? Arguably this film is propaganda. I’m not saying it is either way, but it does feel like the involvement of the family, as usual, throws into question the objective nature of the film. And given the ultimate conclusion of the story that feels a bit gross. The film is pretty long and everything but the singing is either bland or sad. I don’t like that. People who know me always say there are two things Patrick doesn’t like: things that are bland, and things that are sad. (Editor’s Note: that’s true, that’s what I always say)
The BMT? Hell to the no. Why would I ever watch this film again? Why did I watch this film at all? I wonder if in the future we’ll have to replace the Romance category like we replaced the Sci Fi category long ago and very explicitly call it the Romance/Drama category. I do think it is much more likely we could find good Dramas in the end, at least those are more likely to be bad because they are weird instead of dull.
I said I had some thoughts on how to get indexing done in the last Recap … but that isn’t for today. Instead, I just wanted to look and see if using smaller images would do anything drastic. Why smaller? Well, there are two paths according to the documentation, one for images of size <300ish pixels, and one for larger. I, by default, tend to use 280×420 as my poster size when saving stuff. But I did wonder whether that was contributing to the indexing problems. So I decided to test it with 140×210 posters instead:
Nope. Didn’t help. Onwards and upwards.
Obvs this is basically a Where’s Where or Setting as a Character (Where?) for bits and bobs of London. I recognized a ton of places, mainly because Camden Town is quite a good vegan neighborhood in London. I’ll leave it at that though. This film is Bad, in that it is boring, but it is closer to good than BMT in the end regardless because at least the singing is pretty good.
Read all about dark things I assume in the Quiz,
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 