Life is so simple sometimes. At the cinema anyway. You keep the pretty, the cute, the favorable. You erase everything else. The ugly, the dark and the ambiguous. A few months ago, we were already treated to the pleasant adventures of the superhero Bob Marley. A holy man who never had the slightest connection with Jamaican gangs and their violence, nor with the most politicized Rastafarians (often polygamous and homophobic…), too busy singing about universal love on this blue planet which is our common home. Well then.
In the movie Bob Marley: One love, “love makes him blind, religion too, and avoids any complexity of character and context. What follows is an artificial product, more sanitized than season 12 of Star Ac”then wrote the site Exit magazinewhile very naively, the majority of the major media (especially television) promoted, without the slightest reservation, this bluette on the big screen with the light scent of grass which makes you laugh.
Cool, maaaaan… Important clarification: this film, which would have deserved to be titled SpongeBob in the Kingdom of Care Bears was produced by one of the Marley sons, emissary of a family who locked the script down to the last comma.
READ ALSO : Bob Marley: with the release of the film “One Love”, is there still a reggae community in France?
A “feel good movie” about Amy
And here it starts again, this time with the sultry Amy Winehouse. Except no: sulfurous, it should not be said. Amy is a small bird with fragile wings. Her only drama is this inner musical fire that burns her, this too strong passion! This is how she is portrayed in Back to Black, which one would think was produced by Disney studios. His youthful alcoholism, his addictions to cocaine, heroin, then everything that can be drunk, snorted and injected? Barely mentioned.
The carnivorous entourage who only sees her as a big bank account in a skirt and little legs? Here too, a watered down reality. Even scandalously disguised, since Mitch Winehouse, the father of the singer who died at the age of 27 (with 4.16 grams of alcohol in his blood, a lethal dose) finds himself miraculously transformed into a brave, generous and selfless man, while in truth, he had abandoned his daughter… before coming back to pick her pockets once his glory came.
What a mess! But wait, we are told in the headset that this ideal father would be one of the producers of this “ feel good movie », whose screenplay he had rewritten several times, all to his advantage?
READ ALSO : “Amy”, documentary copy under amphetamines
Incidentally, thanks be given here to Courtney Love, American musician and widow of Kurt Cobain, who always refused to allow the tumultuous life of the Nirvana leader to be brought to the screen as part of a biopic bearing his name. A movie ” inspired by “ was indeed signed by Gus Van Sant – Last days, in 2005 – but it was in no way an official biopic. And since then, Courtney Love has discouraged all candidates. Thank you for our eyes, our ears, and our memories.
And let us clarify this again, for fans of these two great musicians who are still unaware of it, happiness lies elsewhere: on the side of documentary work, with Marley by Kevin MacDonald released in 2012, and with Amythe remarkable, colorful story shot by Asif Kapadia in 2015 (a documentary that Winehouse's father, in real life, tried to ban…) Much more powerful than cinema, at least for dealing with these two complex stories : the different perspectives on this precious thing called… reality.
