Amy (2015)

AMY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Asif Kapadia
The short, messed-up life of Amy Winehouse, a lively, fun-loving girl from North London, whose career trajectory in the early 2000s took her from jazz artist to pop superstar to junkie to corpse, most of it recorded on camera. There's a sense of inevitability about this, partly because you know how the story ends, and partly because it's not clear anybody or anything could've changed the outcome, anyway. Winehouse had demons and a capacity to self-destruct, no doubt. Throw in her apparent exploitation at the hands of her crackhead husband and her suspiciously self-serving dad, together with the crass nature of 21st-century celebrity, and you wonder if she ever even had a chance. "I don't think I'm going to be at all famous," Winehouse says early on. "I don't think I could handle it." She was right, but it came to her anyway, and a witness remembers her talking close to the end about how she'd trade everything just to be able to walk down the street without being hassled. In between, there's the girl with the dynamite voice, playing dress-up in her trademark beehive and mascara, alternately bright and creative or woozy and strung-out, a kid who never got to grow up. She was a tabloid joke in the end, the world's most ruthlessly publicized waste case, and everybody wanted a piece of her. There was no escape. She died in London, July 23, 2011, from the combined effects of bulimia and alcohol. She was 27, the magic number for music legends clocking out young. Amy Winehouse had left the building and joined the club.