This Halloween, the dead will rise again. But forget Night of the Living Dead. Forget Dead Alive. Forget 28 Days Later. Instead, darkness falls across the land...the midnight hour close at hand...your body starts to shiver, and no mere mortal will be able to resist...Michael Jackson's This Is It.
With a color spectrum to rival Argento's filmography, body contortions that would give Linda Blair chills, and back-up dancers with a thirst for fame (and blood), This Is It opens a window into the phantasmagorical imagination of pop music's most legendary acts.
Produced in the four months following Jackson's sudden passing, the film compiles the extensive rehearsal footage of his final tour, a last hurrah for the fading star. Cameras rolled on every moment from auditions to dress rehearsals, capturing the grandiose of the whole affair. Ever had dreams of watching Jackson share screen time with Humphrey Bogart? Or a giant robot spider make it's way upstage and give birth to Michael? Or an army of "Thriller" zombies performing ghastly ribbon dances on par with Cirque du Soleil? It would have happened.
The scares keep coming with a segment starring a little girl trapped in a jungle on the brink of deforestation. As Michael wails his single "Human Nature", an actual bulldozer emerges from beneath the stage, barreling towards the king of pop, who uses the forces of love to stop it dead in its tracks. I'm going to have to try that sometime.
It's was an enormous production, revamping classics like, "The Way You Make Me Feel" into a West Side Story-style dance-off, or recreating retro TV sets so Jackson can relive his Jackson 5 past. Unfortunately, the film can't match it. We see the potential of an amazing show, but the MJ on display is raw, unrehearsed. What fans expect they won't get. That's logical, it was only a rehearsal. Jackson runs at 70%, and by the three-quarter mark he's visibly out of steam.
It didn't really matter what ended up in this movie, fans were predestined to love it. As a result, the film feels effortless and safe, rarely escaping the rehearsal footage for outside perspectives on a man always in the spotlight but who we know little about. We see interviews with a few dancers and musicians, but nothing insightful outside of, "genius", "all about love", "Wanted to save the Earth." I saw Free Willy, I get it.
What could have been a personal tribute to an influential artist ends up a display of the expansive discography Jackson created over the years...but so is the double box set I have at home. They rushed the film to meet their Halloween deadline (it was Jackson's favorite holiday, who would have guessed?), and instead of a documentary or concert film, the producers and director Kenny Ortega (who recently brought us the horror classic High School Musical 3) deliver a bloated behind-the-scenes featurette. What are they going to put on the DVD??
Am I being a curmudgeon because I didn't dance in my underpants to Thriller for weeks on end as a kid? Perhaps. But this holiday season, I think I'll stick with Jackson's classic horror short, Ghosts. OK, that's kind of creepy.
