Back To Black, the Amy Winehouse biopic, has been the subject of a cacophony of criticism. You can choose from the objections.
Marisa Abela doesn’t sing as well as Amy (of course not); the portrayal of Amy’s drug addict husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is too sweet; his taxi driver father, Mitch, is too friendly – and so on, everyone has their memory loss.
I saw an early screening and really enjoyed the film, especially Marisa’s touching performance as Amy, once described as a “Jewish girl from north London with tons of attitude.”
A girl full of life and mischief with the powerful voice of a flamboyant New York singer.
While there are points to criticize, critics have missed the central point and strength of director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film. It very powerfully captures what it means for a young woman to fall fatally, hopelessly, in love with the wrong person.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse, alongside Jack O’Connell as Amy’s junkie husband, Blake Fielder-Civil
Amy Winehouse became one of the most famous singers of her time, but she was also a twenty-something who found herself embroiled in a disastrous love affair. Love was the drug that destroyed her, not alcohol or narcotics.
Fielder-Civil was a grimy character and Jack O’Connell’s casting is too wholesome for the pale, heroin-needle-thin guy he actually was. But this is the person Winehouse fell for.
God knows, many of us have, at some point, made bad decisions in love. We were captivated by characters that all of our friends and family knew were a bad idea. But have we listened? Do we care about their opinion? Who knows what Fielder-Civil completely tore Amy down when he left her to go back to his old girlfriend, but not to the point of tearing her down so she couldn’t create sublime music. “You go back to her and I go back to the dark,” as she wrote in the title track.
Marisa’s portrayal of the ups and downs of this relationship is extremely compelling.
You feel her in the grip, both physically and emotionally, of him, and of his absolute agony when he abandons her.
Biopics will never tell the complete story of a person’s life – they compress and shape themselves to create a narrative work. And as we saw in The Crown, the closer they are to the subject’s life, the more open they are to criticism that they’re not being faithful enough.
Despite this, Back To Black does a great job of bringing to the screen the intensity of Amy’s emotions that inspired her superb performances and songs.
Amy Winehouse and her husband, musician Blake Fielder-Civil, loved each other in 2007
Is the writing on the wall for Brooklyn?
Amy has poured her heart out in her songs, while Brooklyn Beckham posts love letters to his wife Nicola on Instagram. Why would anyone do that?
Perhaps the answer is that while neither couple has difficulty establishing any sort of career, their two-year-old marriage is the best story Brooklyn has to offer its 16.4 million Insta followers. .
Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz have been married for two years
Nazanin proves we are what we wear
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe recounts the power she felt when she was finally allowed to wear civilian clothes in her Iranian prison, rather than the prison uniform. Clothes are a crucial part of our identity and not being allowed to wear what you choose is dehumanizing – ask any teenage schoolgirl.
Uniforms strip people of their individuality but give them an identity. The prison uniform is humiliating because it characterizes the wearer, whoever he or she may be, as just another inmate, whereas other uniforms, such as those of the army, are worn proudly.
During Covid, most of the people who kept the country running wore uniforms – supermarket staff, transport workers, NHS staff, firefighters. They have earned our respect. The big difference between them and Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s situation is that they usually wore these clothes by choice.
Nazanin pictured with her daughter Gabriella during her imprisonment in Iran
Why lunch is now the new dinner
Last year I wrote that people had started dining much earlier in London restaurants. Six months later, things have evolved so much that lunch has become the new dinner.
With lunch, you have all afternoon and evening to prepare the meal and a few glasses of wine, then you don’t need to eat for the rest of the day, freeing you up for essential activities like than have a bite to eat. box.
Remote working means no one knows or cares if you’ve taken a long lunch break and for those following fad, time-restricted fasting diets, you can binge at lunch and easily deprive the required number of hours.
If lunch is the new dinner, what about breakfast?
Here’s a way to get us to buy British products
Lots of people thought Brexit was a good idea, but I wonder if they tried to bring a skirt back to a store in Copenhagen, like me.
Having read that free returns were offered, I bought two, to have the choice of size. I’m stupid. I hadn’t seen that the offer only applied in the EU. Now I have to pay 50% of the skirt value to return the wrong size, and I also waste a lot of time finding tedious customs and DHL mail forms. I suppose this is all to encourage us to buy British products.
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