Docs are a tool of bringing justice to topics, usually in retrospect. Spatial and temporal perspective, multiple sources. And yet it’s in the hands of the filmmaker’s inner sense of truth. Absolutely no such thing as objective representation.  

Amy, this year’s Oscar winning documentary, is a complete fraud, according to Mitch Winehouse - the dad, even though he stars in the thing and gives accounts. This makes the real life saga immediately trump the final-cut construction of the film.

• No talking heads - thank goodness, just off screen accounts from family, friends, even from notoriously infamous sith lord Blake, first boyfriend, then husband, then just lost;
• Generally unpleasant form, borrowed probably and beyond escape from the likes of E!, keeps you prisoner of staring endlessly into successions of still frames of Winehouse, which are meant to act as “here, see the signs? see how she was sick, abandoned?” hints

Fortunately, form quickly is preceded by content in the shape of Winehouse’s fierce and magnetic talent, whose just a fucking little wonder.

We do take pleasure in vicariously watching the rise and fall of people, ideas, empires. It’s comforting. 

(by all means, Joshua Oppenheimer’s doc “The Look of Silence” is incomparable in 2015 and should simply not be in the same hat with “Amy”)