Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 2, 2018

Boy, it’s been a hard few years for those watching documentaries about doomed chanteuses. 2015 brought us Amy, which detailed the spectacular rise and devastating fall of Amy Winehouse, and then a year later (more or less) What Happened, Miss Simone? came along to give an account of the somewhat “slower motion” decline of Nina Simone after her spectacular rise. Just a few weeks ago I reviewed Whitney, a frankly disturbing look into Whitney Houston’s once glittering career and tragic downfall (that documentary also rather dramatically threw a Warwick under the bus, but I’ll let those interested do a bit of sleuthing to figure out what I’m alluding to). So there’s an almost palpable sense of déjà vu that accrues here, even divorced from the previous Winehouse documentary, in what is in essence a kind of Behind the Music-ish look at what is arguably Winehouse’s best regarded album. There is some unabashedly wonderful candid footage of Amy interwoven here with equally candid (in other ways) interviews with the two producers associated with Back to Black, Mark Ronson and Salaam Bemi, along with some of the musicians who played on the album.

If there’s a curiously discursive quality to parts of this Classic Albums “episode” (for want of a better term), especially with regard to Amy’s substance abuse (more about that in a moment), that perhaps only serves to point out what is arguably the best thing about “the real story behind the modern classic” (as the cover advertises this piece), and that’s the more “technical” aspects that Ronson and Salaam brought to this enterprise. The interviews with the producers (along with members of Dap-Kings) are often fascinating as they chart (no pun intended) their attempts to bring an early to mid-sixties Girl Group vibe to the project, sometimes at odds with Winehouse’s original conceptions for certain songs.

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is in fact Amy’s drug use, which is addressed kind of haphazardly, and then almost shockingly in terms of some anecdotal reminiscences where those associated with the single “Rehab” weren’t especially thrilled that aspects of the song were playing out in real life. There are some comments about Amy having pretty much disappeared down the substance abuse rabbit hole by the night of her famous Grammy Awards haul, but even that is kind of mentioned in a throwaway comment. There are allusions to Amy’s roiling romantic life, but I think Amy Winehouse: Back to Black might have benefitted from more serious examination of what this gifted artist was going through and why she chose the path she did.

Still, this is a fascinating and often compelling account of the making of a now legendary album. It’s fun to hear producers and engineers pointing out various interesting aspects of the album, as when Salaam kind of hilariously relays how a tea kettle whistle made it into one tune. The candid footage with Amy also shows what a kind of goofy soul she was, laughing and joking and seeming at times not to have a care in the world.

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, and Universal Music Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.78:1 (as can be gleaned from some of the screenshots accompanying this review, some of the archival video tends to hover around Academy ratio). This has a perhaps slightly more heterogeneous look than even these documentaries cobbled together from many sources tend to anyway due to some fairly ragged archival video, some of which looks like it had an interlaced source. With that understanding, much of the archival video is so compelling from a historical importance that its technical deficits can probably be pretty easily overlooked. All of the contemporary interview footage looks nicely sharp and well detailed, and there some great aerial establishing shots of places like Brooklyn and Miami that offer good depth of field. My hunch is some stock footage was also utilized, notably in a few snippets of "urban" scenes around Manhattan, and those, like the archival video of Amy, can look just slightly ragged when compared to the newer contemporary elements.

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black features LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes, and given the fact that this is by and large a talking heads enterprise, and that even a lot of the music snippets offered feature Amy alone with her guitar, some may feel the surround track doesn't really up the sonic ante that much. That said, there's definitely greater amplitude across the board on the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, and the snippets including the Dap-Kings, along with some later vignettes documenting the kind of funny desire of the producers to add strings when Amy was adamantly opposed to doing so, can fairly significantly open up, at least for a moment or two, in the surround version. Fidelity is fine across the board on both tracks, even in some of the older archival video that's utilized.

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• An Intimate Evening in London (1080i; 32:49) is the fantastic "private performance" (plus a couple of great rehearsal versions) Amy gave the night of the Grammy Awards where Back to Black took home several awards. The supplement includes the following songs:

  You Know I'm No Good

  Rehab

  Addicted

  Tears Dry On Their Own

  Back to Black

  Hey Little Rich Girl

  A Message to You Rudy

  Love is a Losing Game

  You Know I'm No Good (Rehearsal)

  Rehab (Rehearsal)

Additionally, this is the fairly rare Eagle Rock release that contains an insert booklet, this time with an appealing essay by Paul Sexton which is accompanied by a slate of stills of Amy.

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's an unavoidable sadness that takes over as one watches Amy Winehouse: Back to Black, along with perhaps even a touch of anger, as some fans may ask how such a gifted, funny and seemingly self aware artist like Amy could have wandered into a kind of hell from which she wasn't able to escape. Some of Amy's personal demons aren't really addressed all that well in this piece, but for those who geek out at hearing about the nuts and bolts of constructing a classic album, Amy Winehouse: Back to Black provides a lot of really interesting information. Technical merits are solid, and the supplemental concert is outstanding. Recommended.