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Michael Jackson's This Is It review: Triumphant documentary 'weeps love'
This Is It
A documentary by Kenny Ortega featuring Michael Jackson, Kenny Ortega, Travis Payne, Michael Bearden, Judith Hill, Orianthi Panagaris, Mo Pleasure, Stacy Walker and Tony Testa.
Running time: 112 minutes
Rating: Four stars out of five
The way you make me feel. In the end, that’s all there is: A collection of shared impressions and individual emotions swirling around a physical presence. Remove the corporeal proof, and the feelings still remain.
Perhaps that was the single biggest revelation in watching This Is It, the highly anticipated event documentary from Kenny Ortega featuring backstage footage of Michael Jackson’s Los Angeles rehearsals.
As we all know, Jackson was booked to perform 50 shows before a cumulative audience of over a million at London’s Millennium Dome. It was booked as his comeback after a 12 year absence, but a fatal cardiac arrest last June closed the curtain before it even opened — leaving those closest to him, and the rest of the world, in a state of suspended disbelief.
Jackson’s confusing public persona seemed too broad, and simply too fractured, to disappear in an instant. So we talked about him ad nauseam in an attempt to figure it all out and fit the pieces together.
We couldn’t.
But This Is It does.
Serving as an ethereal signal delay, this cobbled-together rehearsal footage brings the echoing presence of Jackson back into his body, and back on stage, where we came to know and love the man as a gifted performer and a musical genius.
Jackson was nothing short of a pop savant, and longtime creative collaborator and This Is It director Kenny Ortega cements the very best of Jackson into the historical record as he shows us the man in his element.
Assembled from more than 100 hours of footage from three different camera crews, Ortega essentially presents a jigsaw puzzle version of the show that would have been – as it evolves through different run-throughs of the familiar and still-catchy tunes.
Ortega craftily builds an arc right through the middle of the movie just through his clip selections as he shows us Jackson rediscovering his performance mojo.
Ensuring he finds enough light and shadow to give us a three-dimensional portrait of the artist as a working man, we see Jackson in different moods as he carries the show on his shoulders, insisting on perfection from every single participant – especially himself.
And you have to hand it to the man: He was a total pro.
From his gentle direction to music supervisor Michael Bearden on the opening bars of The Way You Make Me Feel – in which he tells the studio luminary to let it simmer, like “you’re dragging yourself out of bed” – to his older-brother style coaching of lightning fingered female guitarist Orianthi Panagaris, telling her “this is your moment, and we’re all here for you,” Jackson understood he was team leader.
At the same time, we can see how Ortega was a bit of the wizard behind the curtain, making sure Jackson felt nurtured, heard and tended – without losing any sense of being in charge.
It’s a delicate balance, and every time you see Ortega on screen, it’s usually one of those moments where he just plain surrenders to MJ’s greatness.
Many of these moments are actually quite funny, partly because Jackson looks a little confused and wary of all the love coming from his professional collaborators.
At one point in this mesmerizing movie, we see Jackson put his whole singing voice into the rehearsal for Billie Jean as the audience – the crew and dancers in attendance – go absolutely crazy.
Blown away at getting a private show of Jackson’s signature tune, and just being there for what promised to be history, is clearly a moving event for these artists and technicians.
It’s also surprisingly moving for us, the average Joes and Janes who never got to know MJ in any personal or professional way.
Of course, at first, all we really see is Jackson’s scarecrow frame and his freakish facial features because we’re looking for signs of his imminent demise. Ortega seems to recognize this, too, and ensures we don’t even see Jackson’s eyes sans sunglasses until a bit later in the reel.
As the movie, and the rehearsal hours, get deeper, we see the fully engaged musician and artist at work without reservations. Even though we get used to his skinniness, and his sunglasses, and his face, we can tell there are health issues there – if only because every time he opens his mouth, we need subtitles to figure out just what he’s saying.
Ortega shows us some of Jackson’s obsessive-compulsive qualities, but always, as MJ would say “with the love.” And this is why This Is It has the emotional power it does: The movie weeps love.
Sure, there’s a whiff of cheese to the feeling, and the minute the digital dolphins, orcas and endangered Amazonian animals scamper across the screen, we remember the boyish side of the man. But we can embrace it this time around because it’s not only sincere, his rainforest campaign is also rational.
This Is It resurrects the image of Jackson as a thinking, largely sane and supremely talented enigma who helped defined popular culture in the latter half of the 20th century.
More than anything, though, it’s all about the way it makes you feel. This Is It takes the viewer on a highly charged and incredibly human emotional voyage because it’s the most unmediated footage of Jackson we’ve ever seen.
It’s authentic. It’s sincere, and it’s the last creative will and physical testament of a man we fully never understood, but chose to love anyway.
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looks like the majority of reviews are positive... or is it only the positive ones that are being posted here? 