If you want to save the eye strain of reading this review, just hop over to YouTube and watch the first minute of this movie where the interviewer asks, "So tell me, Amy, what do you really want to get out of life?"
What follows is a pointless, meandering ramble of Nigel Tufnellian proportions, where she asserts that she just wants to sing, then apparently confusing herself she says that she just wants to live her life, then asserts that she just wants to be Amy Winehouse, ultimately punctuating her monologue with "you know, I just want to be loved and love unconditionally."
All that was missing was "and these go to eleven."
I'm being completely serious, I was so intrigued by that atrocious, unflattering opening that I actually bought the DVD (on ebay for a buck forty nine) and couldn't wait to watch what promised to be, at best, a disrespectful but funny mockumentary, or at worst, one of those movies that's "so bad it's good."
What followed was the worst of all possibilities. Although the Tap-ish "mockumentary" style continued, adding scores of interviews with random people who are never identified, occasionally spicing things up with cutaways to dramatic recreations of events (dear lord I feel sorry for the poor young actress who played teenage Amy and spent half her screen time with her head in a toilet), ultimately there were no joke payoffs, and the production wasn't quite horrendous enough to tip the needle from "bad" to "so bad it's good".
I ended up getting bored and skipping ahead to the death scene. And, omg, words cannot describe my reaction. Let's just say, imagine if someone made a film about the Hindenburg disaster, and in the climactic scene they just showed everyone laying down and going to sleep.
Pros: The actress playing Amy was actually quite good. I don't know how authentic her portrayal was, but she was fun to watch. I'm being completely serious: if someone were to hand her a comedy script along the lines of Spinal Tap, I would go see it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, "Amy Winehouse: Fallen Star" never quite made it to eleven. A bit like an 18 inch replica of Stonehenge, it didn't quite measure up.
PS I imagine someone could make a fun drinking game of this movie where every time someone says "Oimy!" everyone has to take a slug.
