Amy Winehouse, despite only releasing two albums in her lifetime (yes, I am aware of her posthumous album), was one of the great singers of our time if not all time.  Sure, there are people that saw her as a crazy drugged out singer, but her ability to work with melodies and just belt it out was magical.  She truly had an incredible voice and was experimenting with jazz in a way that no other artists were at the time.  Her sound was straight out of a 60s Bond film.  I enjoy documentaries and I was curious to see just where Amy Winehouse came from and how her life turned to darkness full of drugs and alcohol.

I am not going to explore the plot of this film since it is a documentary; however, this documentary in particular focuses a lot on Amy Winehouse’s life from when she was a teenager onward.  There is little talk about her childhood.  I have to say that I thought this documentary would show old footage and use modern interviews, but instead it uses old footage with older interviews.  It’s a little misleading because the entire movie was just old footage of Amy instead of interviews with the people who knew her and worked with her.  It’s not that that was a bad thing, but I just hoped for something a little more than strictly ‘found footage’ of Amy.  It would have been nice to have seen more footage of Amy working in the studio and/or her input on her records other than footage of her preparing for concerts and singing at concerts.  I wanted more ‘Amy’.

For anyone who loves jazz and/or Amy Winehouse, this is a great documentary, the only downside was that it was just missing that special something to make it the perfect movie.  I left thinking that it could have had more or modern interviews.  I learned a lot about Amy Winehouse’s life, which I suppose was the goal of the film, but I have seen better documentaries.

Image Credit: http://speakertv.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Amy-Winehouse.jpg