Comment on ArtsBeat: A Word With Kent Tritle

The most arresting scene in Back to Black is not the first time we see a young Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) strum a guitar or perform for an audience. It is, instead, a shot of her racing through the streets of London, in search of her then ex-boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), rushing headlong toward a passionate reunion.

(BIG SUR, Calif.) — A section of California’s scenic Highway 1 leading to the famous Big Sur coast reopened to around-the-clock traffic Friday after stabilization of a storm-triggered rockslide that dropped a chunk of one lane into the ocean and hampered tourism. The gap has yet to be closed, but after placement of steel and concrete into the cliff, a temporary signal system was activated to allow alternating north-south traffic on the undamaged lane, according to the California Department of Transportation. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The reopening came eight days ahead of schedule and just in time for summer travel. “Highway 1 is the jewel of the California highway system and our crews have been working non-stop for the last month and a half so Californians can have unrestricted access to this iconic area of our state,” Caltrans Director Tony Tavares said in a statement this week. Big Sur is a 90-mile (145-kilometer) stretch of the state’s central coast where misty, forested mountains rise up from the ocean.

When Sam Taylor-Johnson signed on to direct Back to Black, she had one main objective. “I wanted people to come out and feel like they got a new insight,” she says from her home in Somerset, England. It’s a task that’s not as simple as it might sound, when you consider the significance of Amy Winehouse’s musical legacy—and, for better or worse, her tragic demise—in pop-culture history.

(STONECREST, Ga.) — Hundreds of Air Force members in dress blues joined Roger Fortson’s family, friends and others at a suburban Atlanta megachurch on Friday to pay their final respects to the Black senior airman, who was shot and killed in his Florida home earlier this month by a sheriff’s deputy. People lined up well before the start of the service at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest to file past the open coffin and say their goodbyes to Fortson, who was shot six times by a deputy responding to a May 3 call about a possible domestic violence situation at Fortson’s apartment complex in the Florida Panhandle.

Amy Winehouse wrote songs that cut to the core of heartbreak, and sang them in a voice as supple and sturdy as raw silk. In her short lifetime she earned millions of fans, a number that has only increased since her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, at age 27.

Sam Taylor Johnson’s hotly anticipated Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, was contested by the late musician’s fans from the day it was announced. For some, it felt too soon following Winehouse’s untimely death in 2011; for others, a musical drama invited the possibility of caricature at best and exploitation at worst. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Fresh in the mind of Winehouse fans was Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, Amy, which shed light on her on-and-off romantic relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced the young singer to hard drugs, and her father, who has disputed the film’s depiction of him as greedy and uncaring.