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Movie Review: ‘Amy’ Is An Absorbing Look At Tragic Star

Movie Review: ‘Amy’ Is An Absorbing Look At Tragic Star

By Preston Jones, Fort Worth Star-Telegram (TNS)

“I don’t think I’ll be famous,” Amy Winehouse remarked in 2003. “I don’t think I could handle it.”

She was half-right, but more than she knew.

This month marks four years since Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning at the far-too-young age of 27.

Amy, director Asif Kapadia’s absorbing documentary about the Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter, makes you feel the loss — quite acutely, at times — all over again.

Employing archival footage and contemporary interviews with every major figure in Winehouse’s life, including her ex-husband, Blake Fielder, and her parents, Janis and Mitchell Winehouse, Amy traces the ascent of the fiercely talented and willful Winehouse from rebellious teenager to global superstar.

Everyone interviewed speaks candidly about Winehouse, even as the story grows progressively more harrowing and sad.

The performer was aptly described by one record executive as a “very old soul in a young body,” and Amy doesn’t offer many revelations, particularly as Winehouse’s downward spiral is concerned.

After all, much of that grim drama played out in print, on TV, and online.

Instead, Amy gives a behind-the-scenes account of her rise to fame, and the few, fleeting moments where it seemed as if she was destined to become an artist for the ages.

Curiously, Kapadia chooses to begin in Winehouse’s teenage years, and barring a few brief mentions, effectively avoids her childhood (despite her early life being mentioned repeatedly in the film as a source of trauma). He moves briskly through her discovery by her first manager, Nick Schmansky, and the recording of her 2003 debut, Frank.

Particularly in the early part of Kapadia’s film, he luxuriates in Winehouse’s guileless performances, letting the film dwell on the concert footage grabbed at various pubs and industry functions, that matchless voice pouring out of her, as effortless as breathing.

But even amid the beauty of Winehouse’s songwriting and singing, darkness begins to creep in. Bulimia and alcoholism are both waved off — Winehouse’s father, Mitchell, seems particularly callous, telling his daughter at one point that rehab isn’t necessary.

Once Winehouse records her breakout sophomore album, 2006’s Back to Black (another event given oddly short shrift), the fame Winehouse never really sought descends with a vengeance, as she tumbles into a black hole of drinking and drug addiction.

For as much as Kapadia traces Winehouse’s artistic evolution — there is talk, late in the film, of her desire to form a supergroup with the Roots’ Questlove, Raphael Saadiq and Mos Def (an early champion); the mind boggles at that array of talent — the director also fashions a subtle indictment of the tabloid media, as well as Winehouse’s oblivious, fame-drunk father. (In one heartbreaking sequence, he shows up during a respite in St. Lucia, with a TV camera crew in tow.)

Amy proves truly shattering when providing glimpses of Winehouse with her guard down; watching Winehouse as her idol, Tony Bennett, announces one of her 2007 Grammy wins, is incredibly moving.

The ugly unraveling of Winehouse’s life infuriates and saddens anew, as Kapadia’s poignant documentary reminds viewers of what was and what might have been, but was ultimately, tragically never to be.
___
AMY
4 out of 5 stars
Director: Asif Kapadia
Cast: Amy Winehouse; Blake Fielder; Mitchell Winehouse
Rating: R (language and drug material)
Run time: 128 min.

(c)2015 Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Nina Simone Documentary Aims To Reveal Little-Understood Artist

Nina Simone Documentary Aims To Reveal Little-Understood Artist

By Rebecca Keegan, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Kanye West sampled her, Chanel made her into a jingle, and President Barack Obama called her song “Sinnerman” one of his 10 favorites. But for a woman whose music is so widely admired, Nina Simone has long been little understood. Even many fans of the jazz artist and civil rights radical don’t know what fueled the passion and anger that became her trademark, before ultimately leading her to abandon public life in her prime.

Simone’s only child, Lisa Simone Kelly, hopes some of that mystery will lift with the release of the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which opens theatrically June 26 in Los Angeles and will be available on Netflix as well.

“She has a reputation for being difficult, loud and violent, but why?” Simone Kelly said of her mother by phone from her home in France. “We all have a story. My mother suffered. We can go all the way back to when she was a child and people told her her nose was too big, her skin was too dark, her lips were too wide. It’s very important the world acknowledges my mother was a classical musician whose dreams were not realized because of racism.”

Directed by Liz Garbus and executive produced by Simone Kelly, What Happened, Miss Simone? is reaching audiences months before a highly contested biopic, Nina, starring Zoe Saldana in the title role, hits theaters. That film, which came under fire for the casting of the fair-skinned Saldana as Simone and was the subject of a lawsuit by its director, Cynthia Mort, is expected to be released in the fall, according to a spokeswoman for its British production company, Ealing Studios.

Simone is penetrating the mainstream via other media, too: On July 10, Revive Music/RCA Records will release Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone, an album of artists including Lauryn Hill and Mary J. Blige covering her songs.

It was precisely because Simone Kelly was so disturbed by the script for Nina, which focuses on a relationship with a composite character based on Simone’s former nurse and manager Clifton Henderson (played by David Oyelowo), that she decided to participate in the documentary.

“Let’s put it this way, I’m very happy that this movie made it across the finish line first,” said Simone Kelly, an actress and singer who has performed on Broadway in the title role of the Disney musical Aida and released three solo albums. Simone Kelly’s father, Andrew Stroud, was a New York police detective who later became Simone’s manager. “If a lie comes out in the movies, that goes down in history as that person’s journey.”

It’s hard to imagine that a storyteller would need to embellish Simone, who projected a shocking power as a performer even as she shouldered the burdens of genius, racism, sexism and, according to her daughter, mental illness.

In 1964, a time when white audiences expected black female pop singers like the Supremes and the Ronettes to perform love songs and look demure, Simone was delivering the protest anthem “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall, telling the crowd, “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”

“Fusing blues and jazz into standards, talking to her audience, calling them out on whatever she felt they needed to be called out on … For a black woman to do that at time, that was not done,” Garbus said. “They were expected to play and make things nice and not rock the boat.”

Garbus, who was nominated for an Oscar for her 1998 prison film, The Farm: Angola USA, and has also made movies on Bobby Fischer and Marilyn Monroe, was one of a long list of potential directors that production company Radical Media gave to Simone Kelly in 2013. It was in particular Garbus’ treatment of Monroe in the 2012 film Love, Marilyn that caught Simone Kelly’s eye for how it gave dimension to another widely misunderstood woman.

“Liz is female, she’s fearless, she’s got compassion,” Simone Kelly said. “I thought she would tell this story the way Mom would want the story told.”

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Through extensive use of archival performance footage and interviews with key figures like Stroud and Simone’s longtime guitarist Al Schackman, What Happened, Miss Simone? covers the singer’s tragic life arc. There is her childhood as a Bach-loving piano prodigy in North Carolina, her days singing standards in Greenwich Village bars in the 1950s, her awakening to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, her volatile marriage and exile to Liberia and later Europe, and her diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

In excerpts from Simone’s diaries, the film shows the enormous toll of life on the road — she wrote often of her fatigue and of missing her daughter, whom Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, was raising in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Garbus and her team unearthed performance footage a New York University student had shot in 16 mm of Simone at the Village Gate nightclub in New York and tracked down audiotapes of interviews she gave to the man who helped her write her memoirs, Stephen Cleary, who was living in Australia.

“When you listened to her you felt like she had gone through everything you might imagine going through,” Garbus said. “That’s a healing thing, that you can feel like she’s been there and knows your struggle. But the [civil rights] movement could make someone crazy.”

Netflix received an Oscar nomination for a previous documentary acquisition, The Square, a 2013 film about unrest in Egypt. What Happened, Miss Simone? is the first documentary Netflix has financed itself (together with Radical Media). “We’re their ‘House of Cards’ for documentaries,” Garbus said. “Making your first documentary about a radical like Nina is pretty adventurous.”

The documentary galloped along, but the biopic, “Nina,” hit several rough patches. A crucial part of Simone’s identity was not just that she was a black woman but that she was a dark-skinned black woman who was punished for that fact.

So when director Cynthia Mort cast Saldana, multiracial and of Dominican and Puerto Rican parentage, in the title role, many took umbrage. In Ebony, Marc Lamont Hill wrote, “There is no greater evidence of how tragic things are for dark-skinned women in Hollywood than the fact that they can’t even get hired to play dark-skinned women.”

Mort said by phone that she cast Saldana because “she’s committed and she’s amazing.” “I understood that reaction [to the casting], but … Nina was much more than that and lived beyond those definitions,” Mort said.

On the eve of the film’s 2014 Cannes Film Festival screening for potential exhibitors, however, Mort, who wrote the screenplay for the 2007 Jodie Foster thriller The Brave One, filed a lawsuit against her U.K. production company, Ealing Studios, alleging that it breached her director’s agreement and took over creative control of the project. She has since dropped the case.

“We had very, very, very different visions of the film,” Mort said. “But it was time for me to move on. I’m very excited for the documentary because Nina Simone was an important figure to African Americans, to women and to artists.”

A spokeswoman for Ealing says the company is negotiating with a U.S. distributor.

Even before either film’s release, audiences are rediscovering Simone. When John Legend accepted the Oscar for original song for the film Selma in February, he quoted Simone, who had sung “Mississippi Goddam” for the 40,000 marchers from Montgomery to Selma, Ala., whose story is told in the film.

Last summer, as Garbus was editing, protest and civil disturbance were unfolding in Ferguson, Mo. “The footage on the TV looked exactly like our civil rights footage,” Garbus said.

On the June morning of her film’s premiere at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Garbus said she walked into a Starbucks and heard Simone’s voice carrying over the hiss of the espresso machine.

“Why is this happening now?” Garbus asked. “Maybe we need her. Maybe Nina’s an antidote to what’s happened in the music industry. We talk about its commercialization and homogenization. She’s an icon people can call on for a model of honest involvement in the movement as an entertainer.”

Photo: Nina Simone, 1965 via Wikimedia Commons

Documentary On Kent State Shootings Resonates Today

Documentary On Kent State Shootings Resonates Today

As a ’79 graduate of Kent State University, I was eager to watch PBS’ new documentary on the 1970 campus shootings, which killed four students and wounded nine others.

By the time the program was scrolling final credits, I was reeling from a sense of the all-too-familiar.

The Day the ’60s Died debuted Monday night and is now available online at http://www.pbs.org/program/day-60s-died. I recommend it, not just for its clarity of perspective on a devastating time in our country but also for its cautionary message for the here and now.

Change the focus (to recent police brutality) and the cause (to racial justice) and we are forced to consider yet again what happens when our government fails to heed the warning signs of growing unrest.

From the documentary, cast in white letters against a black background:

“By 1970, a majority of Americans believe sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.”

“But many are also critical of the student anti-war movement.”

In 2015, a growing number of Americans believe that too many police officers use excessive force, particularly against citizens of color.

But many are also critical of those who protest, even when they are peaceful.

Lately, I worry that too many of us abhor injustice as long as we’re not inconvenienced by efforts to change it. I was disheartened, for example, by the flood of complaints on social media after peaceful protesters in Cleveland blocked a major artery at rush hour on a single day in November. They were there because police had shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing in a city park with an air gun. You would have thought by the grousing that everyone was delayed from rushing dying passengers to the hospital.

“How does holding up my commute bring justice?” they demanded. Or, as President Richard Nixon put it after he’d already deceived the country about his plans to escalate the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia, “There is nothing new we can learn from the demonstrations.”

Awareness can be so annoying.

Some of the student protesters at Kent State had turned violent on the weekend before the May 4 shootings. No elected officials expressed a desire to get to the heart of why. Instead, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes attempted to dehumanize them, casting them as “worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”

These days, we’d call them animals and thugs, I guess. I do not condone violence, but the name-calling always telegraphs such an unwillingness to consider the long-fermenting reasons behind the growing unrest. That is as true today as it was in 1970.

The PBS documentary offers a vivid contrast between two worlds of Americans, repeatedly shifting from scenes of protest in the U.S. to combat in the fields of Vietnam and Cambodia. Through interviews, we learn that our young men fighting in Cambodia knew that the Ohio National Guard had shot and killed students at Kent State.

Army veteran Ron Orem was one of them. “I remember feeling real anger that a bunch of National Guard guys would shoot down college students,” he says. “If some kid’s throwing a brick at me and I’ve got a loaded rifle, I don’t feel intimidated.”

Veteran Terry Braun was another, and he speaks directly to why he appreciated the student protests: “As we got deeper into Cambodia, we made contact every single day. … I knew that there was a peace movement going on, and I was kind of glad there was. I believe if people weren’t demonstrating, we would still be there.”

Eleven days after the Kent State shootings, police opened fire at protesters on the campus of Jackson State, killing two students and injuring 12 others. A snippet of footage in the aftermath shows a young black man holding a sign that reads, “Shoot me, my back is turned.”

A haunting moment in the documentary shows Arthur Krause reading a statement about his 19-year-old daughter, Allison, who was killed at Kent State:

“She resented being called a bum” — he pauses — “because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion. She felt the war in Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?”

That was then, and this is now, in the words of Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaria:

“I have … not received an apology from the police department or the city of Cleveland in regards to the killing of my son.” She pauses. “And it hurts.”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo: Silver Spring, Maryland, January 24, 2014. The Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition hosted an hour long rally and brief march in downtown Silver Spring to protest ongoing police violence without accountability, most egregiously against people of color. (Stephen Melkisethian/Flickr)

Farewell To <i>Health Care For America Now</i>

Farewell To Health Care For America Now

The campaign that won passage of health care reform is closing up shop, but its grassroots organizing efforts will stand as a model of success for progressives.

Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the grassroots campaign that powered passage of the Affordable Care Act, is about to close its doors, as planned when the campaign started. But the images it generated of Americans passionately fighting to make health care a right will remain with us for years to come. The new movie Inequality For All includes dramatic footage of an HCAN supporter standing up to a Tea Partier. Another documentary released last year, Escape Fire, has stirring footage of an HCAN rally. Pictures of people holding up HCAN signs or wearing HCAN buttons still appear regularly in news magazines.

It makes great sense that HCAN’s actions have become iconic symbols of the fight for health justice in the United States. From its beginning, the heart of the HCAN campaign was outside the Beltway, its strategy grounded in the firm conviction that we could only win the fight for comprehensive reform if we based our campaign on grassroots organizing outside of Washington. We knew that inside the Beltway, the best we could do is provide a credible voice countering the army of thousands of lobbyists for the health care industry. But outside the Beltway, by organizing ordinary Americans, we could win.

Creating a powerful grassroots force is not easy. It took building a campaign that pushed against the culture of D.C., with the support of a funder that was committed to building progressive capacity, not just winning on an issue. Most national issue campaigns are D.C.-centric, run by campaign operatives, constrained by a narrow band of legislative concerns, with an idea of field work that is narrowly focused on generating earned media and emails and phone calls to members of Congress. After a lot of debate, the union and community organizing leaders who built HCAN agreed to spend almost all of its non-paid media resources on field contracts with state-based community organizations and community labor coalitions. These local organizations partnered with the local chapters of national labor unions and netroots groups.

The national strategy and tactics were relentlessly focused on empowering people at the local level to bring their personal passion, and often their personal stories, to their communities and members of Congress. Their work did generate lots of local media and calls to Congress, but it went much deeper than that, building the kind of relationships that are transformational. The campaign’s major funder, the Atlantic Philanthropies, was fully committed to the strategy, believing that even if the legislative effort fell short, their funds would leave in place a more sophisticated and robust capacity for progressive change at the local level. But because Atlantic had faith in the grassroots strategy, both of the foundation’s objectives – passing historic legislation and building capacity – were realized.

While HCAN was always envisioned as a campaign that would end with the passage of legislation, HCAN’s leadership decided to launch HCAN 2.0 to defend the new law after its passage. With many fewer resources, HCAN continued the fight, working on consumer regulations to control insurance premiums, taking part in the public battle around the Supreme Court’s hearing on the ACA’s constitutionality, defending Medicare from privatization, pushing for Medicaid expansion, and always reminding us that the opponents of the ACA are eager to return Americans to the day when insurance companies were fully able to deny them care and jack up their premiums because, indeed, we do get sick.

HCAN is now closing up shop. It may seem a funny time, with the current fracas over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but that is the point. The organization’s campaign mission was to win passage of a law, a mission extended to include “win and secure” the ACA. The debate over the shape of the ACA will continue for years to come – a struggle over how to fix, expand, roll back, or build upon the law. But as each of the millions of Americans who will enroll over the next few months sign up, another nail is hammered in the repeal coffin. Retiring HCAN, its mission accomplished, is another sign that the campaign is keeping its eyes on the prize.

HCAN affirmed my belief that people organizing together can shape history. Paul Starr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of health policy, told me that none of the failed attempts to pass comprehensive health reform had a major, grassroots field component. Earlier this year another noted historian of health reform, Theda Skocpol, published an analysis in which she credited the success of health care reform versus the failure of climate change legislation to HCAN’s deep grassroots strategy, compared with an elite, inside strategy of environmentalists.

It is good to see those lessons being fully embraced by new leadership in the climate change movement, as seen most sharply in the Keystone pipeline fight. The campaign for immigration reform too is powered by a national, grassroots movement led by local leaders who are putting their lives on the line for change. The most energetic new labor organizing is built on helping low-wage workers take local actions, supported by their communities, as part of a growing national effort.

Still, too many issue campaigns and too many funders fail to fully grasp the respectful partnerships and movement-building essential to defeat corporate power and right-wing politics. If we are to make the kind of transformational changes America and the world need, the politics HCAN pioneered, a sharply strategic national campaign built on empowering people through organizations around the country, points the way.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Advisor to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog.

The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Photo: Progress Ohio via Flickr