Back to Black (Movie)

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Did Dua Lipa Flop? + Miserable Pop Music Films

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    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes discussion of:The imperfect rollout of Dua Lipa’s latest album, “Radical Optimism,” and how the narrative around it became poisoned before it was even releasedDua Lipa’s career of smooth and frictionless popThe current pop marketplace favoring eccentricity, humor and meme-abilityWhat it will take for Dua Lipa to break free of her cycleThe struggle of making movies about pop music, including “Back to Black,” the new biopic about Amy Winehouse and “The Idea of You,” about a divorced woman who falls for an aging boy band starSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      How ‘Back to Black’ Recreated Amy Winehouse’s Look

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      In the biopic “Back to Black,” Marisa Abela wears some of the singer’s actual clothes, but the hair and makeup team chose to tone the signature beehive down.Few looks are as distinctive as Amy Winehouse’s was. The singer’s sweeping eyeliner, tottering heels and disheveled beehive are still instantly recognizable, 13 years after her death.In the new biopic “Back to Black,” Marisa Abela plays the star from the beginning of her music career until her final days. She wears mini skirts with girlish ruffles and small kitten heels to begin with, before adopting her distinctive pinup aesthetic as she dives deeper into the music industry and her self-destructive habits.Peta Dunstall, left, the makeup and hair designer for “Back to Black,” working on Abela’s hair on set. Dean Rogers/Focus FeaturesThe film takes its title from Winehouse’s second album, and “when we get to ‘Back to Black’ Amy, it’s more sexy,” the film’s costume designer, PC Williams, said. “There was a big change in the way she presented.”To recreate this, the production team studied many real-life images of Winehouse. But there were also some intentional changes: They were making “a piece of cinema as opposed to creating a documentary,” Williams said. Here is a closer look at the process.Towering HairAbela as Amy Winehouse in “Back to Black.”Dean Rogers/Focus FeaturesThe real Amy Winehouse performing at the Riverside Studios in London 2008.Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for NARASWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Back to Black’ Review: Another Amy Winehouse Biopic? No, No, No.

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      The facts get softened and shuffled for an Amy Winehouse biopic that leaves her perspective at the edges.The director of “Back to Black,” Sam Taylor-Johnson, has said repeatedly in interviews that the movie is meant to center Amy Winehouse’s story in her own perspective. That may or may not be meant as implicit criticism of “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 documentary about the singer, which wove together archival interviews — many damning — with family and friends as well as with Winehouse herself to make the case that everyone was at fault for her untimely demise. Either way, Taylor-Johnson’s remarks suggest that Winehouse, who in 2011 died at the age of 27 of alcohol poisoning, has been co-opted in the years since her death. “Back to Black,” then, is an effort to tell the story the way she would have.But, oof. If that was the aim, I’m comfortable saying it failed completely. “Back to Black” has some bright spots. One is Marisa Abela’s performance as Winehouse, which is deeply and lovingly committed, if at times a little distracting. A few sequences work, too, particularly her marathon pub meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), the man whose exceptionally toxic relationship with Winehouse inspired the album for which the movie is named. (Unfortunately there are very few scenes in which we see Winehouse’s songs coming together — usually the best part of a musician biopic.)“Back to Black” starts with Winehouse expressing that she simply wants people to listen to her music and forget their troubles for a while, and to know who she really was. Then it follows her through her early gigs in Camden pubs, her friendships and her fights with boyfriends. When she meets Fielder-Civil, everything changes — and not for the best. Always a heavy drinker, she gradually becomes addicted to all kinds of substances, in part because he is an addict. When he goes back to his girlfriend, she writes angry songs that become “Back to Black.” When he returns, things get worse.Yet the facts of the real Winehouse’s life and struggles are impossible to ignore, and some of the movie’s choices, from a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh, seem aimed at rewriting her history without her consent. Fielder-Civil, for instance, has said he instigated Winehouse’s first encounter with heroin, but in “Back to Black” she starts shooting up on her own. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Back to Black,’ and the Challenges of Dramatizing Amy Winehouse

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      Several depictions of the singer’s life have explored her tense relationship with fame. The new biopic “Back to Black” instead centers her romantic life.In another life, Sam Taylor-Johnson might have crossed paths with Amy Winehouse. The filmmaker and the singer had some mutual friends, “but we never met,” Taylor-Johnson said recently. “It was like a strange sliding doors moment,” she added: “I would arrive somewhere, and she would have just left.”Taylor-Johnson is the director of “Back to Black,” a new biopic about Winehouse that stars Marisa Abela (“Industry”) as the beloved British singer. In the 13 years since Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning in her North London home at age 27, there has been a posthumous album, a tell-all memoir from her father, an Oscar-winning documentary and several museum exhibitions about her life.Some of these projects — most notably the 2015 documentary, “Amy” — emphasized how ferocious public and tabloid interest in her personal life fueled Winehouse’s addictions. (In a review of that documentary for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “What’s startling now is to realize that we were all watching her die.”)For Taylor-Johnson, it was time to create a narrative that celebrated Winehouse for “her great achievements,” she said. A documentary is a forensic breakdown of someone’s life, Taylor-Johnson added, whereas she saw her own film as “more poetic.”Sam Taylor-Johnson said she had ignored reviews of “Back to Black.” “If a friend starts to tell me, I hang up on them,” the director said. “I don’t want to be thrown off my path.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Back to Black,” which opens in theaters in the United States on May 17, revolves around Winehouse’s turbulent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, an on-off romance that inspired the artist’s soul-inflected album of the same name. “She tells her story through the narrative of her songs,” said Taylor-Johnson. Using the lyrics as the movie’s main source material put Winehouse’s perspective at the center, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More