The acclaimed Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is placed for a wider release to U.S. theaters a few days ago, and although critics have commended the intense, probing film, some of the closest to the singer have campaigned against Amy. While Winehouse’s family have announced that they can “disassociated” in the documentary given it casts the singer’s father Mitch inside a negative light, certainly one of Winehouse’s closest collaborators, Back to Black producer Mark Ronson, has applauded the film, professing that Amy captures Winehouse’s “genius.”
“Obviously, it’s difficult to watch the film as it brings back memories,” Ronson told The Mirror. “But what I love regarding it is that my partner never had reached meet Amy and I am always declaring that stories about us from the studio along with the clever, witty things which Amy would say. We watched it and my lady said, ‘Now I get it. Now I see the Amy you brought up.’ I forget that does not everyone got a chance to see that side of her.”
The Asif Kapadia-directed Amy is constructed primarily from home videos and archival footage that track Winehouse as she grows at a talented teenager with a reluctant star into a worldwide phenomenon. The viewer can be confronted with the numerous enablers who targeted the singer once she became famous and documents, in haunting detail, Winehouse’s unpredictable manner. However, Ronson says Amy also cements Winehouse’s legacy as being a unique, generational talent.
“The really respectful thing regarding the movie quite simply are reminded why she was famous inside the first place – she would have been a genius, that’s the stuff even I can forget,” Ronson said. “I forget anytime I played her the piano chords to ‘Back To Black,’ she wrote the lyrics in a hour. I was amazed; people just don’t write lyrics like this any more. On ‘Rehab’ also, she wrote those lyrics by 50 % hours and they are generally so honest. Whoever thought there’d become a pop record about preferring to be handled by Donny Hathaway than about to rehab, in 2006? Hers were one of the most open, honest lyrics you’re ever likely to hear on pop radio.”
Despite Ronson’s press, also as reviews putting Amy about the same level as being the similarly constructed, equally introspective Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Winehouse’s own family have severed any link with the documentary. “They think that the film is really a missed chance to celebrate her life and talent knowning that it is both misleading possesses some basic untruths,” the Winehouse family said inside a statement. “There are specific allegations made against family and management which might be unfounded and unbalanced.”