The King of Pop is dead

It isn't considered polite to speak ill of the dead. And it could be construed as the height of arrogance to take the King of Pop down a peg from the relatively insignificant vantage point of a critic. Nonetheless, on its merits, This Is It is largely a tedious and mildly depressing portrait of an amazing artist whose considerable musical powers were clearly on the wane.

The film is a collection of documentary footage compiled from rehearsals for Michael Jackson's ill-fated, eponymous concert series that was scheduled to launch in July but was canceled due to the icon's untimely death.

That Jackson had no intention of releasing the footage - it was compiled for technical reasons and bound for his personal library - seems to have had no effect on director Kenny Ortega or the army of sycophantic acolytes and collaborators who cooked up this project and backed its distribution. Ortega in particular comes off as a heartless snake, professing affection and admiration for Jackson when the very existence of the film is due entirely to the star's death and subsequent inability to oppose its release.

In the footage, Jackson repeatedly apologizes for half-hearted, vocally inadequate showings, dismissing his and others' mistakes with the mantra, "This is what rehearsal is for." There is little doubt Jackson is moonwalking in his grave over the international attention drawn to his unfinished production.

Members of Jackson's family have gone on the record as objecting to the distribution of material that the star would never have allowed before the public - which makes the family's collective consent for the project in exchange for a large payday all the more contemptible.

The film isn't all bad. There is a lot of talent on display, after all, and Jackson's artistic vision is amazingly ambitious. Highlights include a stirring rendition of They Don't Really Care About Us, in which the singer exhibits abandon and enjoyment unseen in much of the rest of the film. Immediately following the song is a pitch-perfect performance of HIStory that is so powerful it makes it difficult to believe we are watching a man who was on the brink of death. If the quality of the rest of the footage was this good, there would be some justification for ignoring the artist's expressed intentions and sharing it with the world.

But we've all see Jackson shine. What we haven't seen much is Jackson faltering, showing his age, struggling to hit the notes. The low points in the mix are disturbingly low. Like the sacrilegiously bad Star Wars prequel trilogy, the application of cutting-edge technology strips Thriller (a new sequence was filmed for use in the concerts) of its charm and organic aesthetic.

A Jackson 5 medley is so bad it's embarrassing, with the singer looking visibly uncomfortable with the old songs, reluctant even to sing them during rehearsal. The superficiality of resurrecting the family songbook is underscored as the singer calculatingly rehearses sincerity, explaining the precise point where he'll name each member of his immediate family and tell them he loves them.

Jackson's notorious weird streak is fairly well reined in, and, apart from his creative genius - even in its weakened state, it is still pretty impressive - he almost comes off as normal. But there are certainly bizarre moments. In describing a slight technical difficulty impeding the singer's ability to stay on pitch, he cries, "I feel like a fist is driving into my ear; right into my ear. I'm trying to adjust." Later, while blathering naive platitudes about the environment, he explains in a whine, "The planet is sick, like a fever."

Overall, the artist at work is an intermittently charismatic and sympathetic character. It's too bad the many greedy opportunists who surrounded him have succeeded in marketing this strange documentary as a testament to his legacy.

This Is It has been slated for a brief two-week run. The last opportunity to see the film on the big screen will be Nov. 11.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com