Amazon Prime has released Everybody’s Talking About Jamie! But should it be what everyone is talking about? Here is our, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie Film Review:
The Story
ETAJ (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie), is a film adaptation of the West End Musical. The story talks of Jamie New, a young Sheffield boy with the ambition of being a drag queen. While the singing and dancing has been added, the musical was inspired by a true story! Based on the documentary ‘Jamie: Drag Queen at 16’ directed by Jenny Popplewell, that tells the life of Jamie Campbell.
The Crew
This story is full of dramatic and heart-wrenching scenes, while bringing fun, humorous and magical moments too. The film consisted of much of the shows original score. Composed by the extremely talented, Dan Gillespie Sells and lyrics by the amazing Tom MacRae. The screenplay was then adapted by Tom. There were some breathtaking and mesmerizing pieces of choreography to go along with the beautiful score. The choreography was put together by Kate Prince.
Making his debut for directing was Jonathan Butterell. Jonathan did a great job of telling this incredible story. Creating some tender and intimate moments, while creating large scale movie magic is hard to do. However, at times scenes fell flat. The imbalance of actors energy really showed, draining life out of some scenes. The movie seemed to lose momentum in places, especially after the first half. At the end of the film, the finale went out with a bang, some of that same energy just needed to be injected throughout the film, to keep the audience’s interest alive.
The Cast
Max Harwood starred as Jamie New, Max’s portrayal of Jamie was fun and enjoyable to watch. At times I did feel Jamie was hard to empathize with. Sometimes his anger felt inauthentic. It seemed there was not a journey or a surge of emotion, occasionally it felt like switching between emotions. However, Max’s sarcasm and playfulness brought much joy and many laughs. His vocals were exceptional and his diva truly came out in the best way possible.
For me, Lauren Patel gave a glowing performance! She made the audience fall in love with Pritt’s character, not just through her outstanding acting but also through her singing.
Sarah Lancashire also gave a note-worthy performance of Margret New (Jamie’s Mum). Sarah’s relationship with her son was beautiful. I do feel that the relationship was lacking levels of authority as a mother/son relationship would have, but their presence together made for a great display of eternal love.
Ray’s character is Margret New’s bestfriend and is very much an aunt figure to Jamie. This is quite a large role and one that could have brought more light to darker scenes within the film. However, I feel that Shobna Gulati played this down and didn’t use her whimsical character to bring more contrast to the tone of the film. I felt Shobna’s performance was better placed in a soap. At times I felt it disjointed a lot of relationships with other actors in this particular film and failed to create any contrast or light within darker scenes.
There were many performers in this film that gave great performances to create a really great piece of cinema.
Overall review:
Overall, I would say this film was a fabulous and much-needed watch. Musical Theatre Fans everywhere will be basking in two hours of show-stopping acting, singing and dancing. Some scenes needed tweaking, injecting with more energy and more pace and relationships between actors could have been explored, but it was definitely a hit!
To head to Amazon Prime to find out how you can watch, click here!
To read some of our recent review on Amazon’s Cinderella, click here!
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