Quick Shots

Trainwreck

Released:  July 17^th, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Universal Pictures

Starring:  Amy Schumer, Tilda Swinton, Bill Hader, John Cena, Brie Larson, Colin Quinn

Directed by:  Judd Apatow

Written by:  Amy Schumer

Personal Bias Alert:  not an Apatow fan, likes nearly all the supporting cast

4.9 of 10

            Writer and star Amy Schumer’s career has been on a meteoric rise the last couple years, with her sketch comedy series gaining more and more ardent followers with each successive outing.  Its third season has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and gained a Peabody Award alongside programs like the political thriller The Honorable Woman and the news satire Last Week Tonight, a background which might prime you for a smart comedy that skewers societal norms or plays with genre standards.  That’s how Trainwreck is being billed, and even how many critics are taking it, but it’s actually little more than a bawdy outfit covering a very traditional walk of shame.

            Amy’s Amy (yep, the character shares her name) is a 30-something magazine writer who’s a bit too self-absorbed and way too damaged to commit to a relationship when a fling with one of her article’s subjects threatens to knock her life back onto the tracks.  The plot is as traditional as they come, trying to distract you from its tameness with raunch that has a surprisingly nasty undertone.  Any deviation from traditional sexuality (i.e. loving man-woman stuff) is played for laughs in protracted, lazy sex scenes that border on offensive to those of us with an open mind about what turns people on.  I mean, am I really supposed to laugh at a guy who’s in touch with his emotions, has healthy relationships and goals, and may or may not be gay?

            However, when the comedy manages to get back on the right side of offensive, it delivers some bursting laughs.  An almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton appears as a one-liner machine and LeBron James proves a surprisingly adept straight-man, with most of the big moments reserved for Amy herself.  But the hits are outweighed by the cringe-inducing misses, and the alleged social commentary is as out of date as a grown man making a comedy about a (wo)man-child.

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Amy

Rated:  R

Distributor:  A24

Directed by:  Asif Kapadia

Edited by:  Chris King

Personal Bias Alert:  not an Amy Winehouse fan

7.5 of 10

            I just couldn’t get behind Amy Winehouse when she was alive, and it had everything to do with her talent.  Her music was an honest glimpse inside a troubled mind, and the frail body belting it out left no doubts about its authenticity.  By the time she burst into the mainstream and into my life with Rehab, her path seemed to already be tread, and I chose not to go along for the tragedy.  With this documentary, Asif Kapadia aims to dig deeper into the whys of Winehouse’s life, but what comes up oddly missing is Amy herself.

            While using traditional interviews, Kapadia completely avoids the talking head setup that many docs lean on, instead putting the audio of these sit-downs over the voluminous footage, both public and private, of Winehouse herself.  The structure is still very linear, with the movie spanning approximately the last 15 years of Winehouse’s life.  What we come to find out is that Winehouse was troubled from even these early years, suffering from depression and self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, and music for most of her life.  This causes the doc to take on the familiar and winding story of the untreated depressive, a slog of ups and downs that leads only to a final, sputtering end.  This lack of arc becomes a bit frustrating as the film drags itself over two hours, sticking resolutely to Amy’s disintegrating life instead of building with her career’s success.

            What Kapadia undeniably captures, though, is Winehouse’s skill and love of music.  Her most forceful opinions and truest expressions stem from this, highlighted by wonderfully added text of her lyrics and isolated vocal tracks.  With Winehouse dead long before the production was conceived, this is the closest thing we have to personal musings on her own life, but even this is only what she could surmise through the haze of her depression.  Because she was never able to beat back the disease, we will never get a clear view of what Winehouse thought of herself.  It’s the elephant in the room, so to speak, and Kapadia never comes up with a way to work around it.  It gives the film a hint of unintentional voyeurism, a feeling made all the more uneasy as the constant spotlight accelerates Winehouse’s decline.  The closest thing we come to a clear-headed moment in the back half of the film is a brief scene where Winehouse gets to do something she’s always dreamed of.  Her wonder at the moment breaks through the haze, but by then she’s too far gone to recover, drenching the whole scene in tragedy.  That’s the greatest achievement of Amy:  instilling the wish that her life could’ve gone on, not for our own selfish reasons, but for her.