In complete fairness, I know nothing of this movie beyond the trailers and clips that have been released. But the Internet certainly hated this clip, and they’re not wrong:
I do think the aforementioned Internet is being awfully hard on whether she LOOKS enough like Amy — in full regalia, she passes pretty well, but also, she’s an actor and is not ACTUAL Amy Winehouse and therefore she’s not going to be a doppelganger. And that’s okay, as long as the performance is good. The jury will be out on that until we get the whole thing, but I will note that in the above clip, the vocals created a stir and… I get that. It sounds like they originally planned to have Marisa Abela train just so that her facial motions would match the dubbed vocals — even fake singing needs to be convincing — but then she studied enough across the four months that “her voice transformed” and Sam Taylor-Johnson decided to have her do it all. This was… potentially a mistake, because Amy’s voice was SO singular and an inextricable part of her. Perhaps in THIS clip it’s intentionally rough because she’s a younger, more raw Amy? But that’s not immediately clear — it’s arguably unfair to Abela to release that one, honestly — and I also don’t know whether Abela is the one singing in the official trailer, which does sound MORE like the real Amy:
Regardless, the uproar may have sucked some of the fun out of this whole experience for poor Abela, who just got hired to do a job and by all accounts worked her butt off to try and fulfill the brief. She looks gorgeous in her Fendi gown, so this part, she definitely aced. Jack O’Connell, who plays her husband Blake Fielder-Civil, is doing the Josh O’Connor Comb-Forward hairdo right now. Maybe it’s an O’Thing. But I really think they should both take each other out for a beer and convince each other to stop. Or, in Winehouse parlance: to say no, no, no.
