..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..The Images & Trailer ..MCN Weekend ..Wilmington on DVD

Michael Jackson's This is It
The House of the Devil
and Labor Day

Michael Jackson’s This Is It  (Three and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Kenny Ortega, 2009

Michael Jackson -- looking like a will-o’-the-wisp in military/gangster drag, singing like honey poured through quicksilver, and dancing like a jitterbug angel whirling on the head of a pin -- gets an extraordinary posthumous sendoff in Michael Jackson’s This Is It. 

Something like Jackson himself, the movie is magical, gushy, drop-dead talented and pretty damned weird: a quasi-concert film, sort-of-documentary assembled from hundreds of hours of rehearsal footage of the upcoming “This Is It” show shot from March to June for Jackson’s private archives. It’s a record of a concert that never was: the London O2 Arena comeback he had been describing, with delicate morbidity, as his last curtain call -- a maybe-farewell or maybe-return to grace that was aborted and superseded by his June 25 death from (apparently) recklessly administered drugs.
     
Directed by Kenny Ortega -- who is also the director for the movie -- the shows, on the evidence here, look like they would have been knockouts. The numbers all play like a playhouse afire, even in these rehearsal tapes. I was particularly fond of the melancholy “Billie Jean” routine and the black-and-white film noir number, costarring Bogey, Rita Hayworth and Edward G. Robinson, created around “Smooth Criminal.“  
     
But the shows didn’t go on, until, in a way, now. Instead, Jackson‘s demise and its wall-to-wall TV news coverage became a kind of from-the-grave farewell tour, triggering a worldwide orgy of public lamentation for the late King of Pop, that, at least temporarily, obliterated the last decade of relative artistic inactivity, plus the bad press and legal wrangles plaguing him over his alleged taste for romps with young boys. 
      
Before the death and eulogies, it had been a sad, creepy spectacle: Jackson, the formidably talented dancer and highly gifted singer-composer of pop music‘s all-time best selling album “Thriller,“ became instead Jacko the Wacko, slowly dyeing himself white; hiding out at his Peter Pan-ish ranch Neverland; dodging legal snares; querulously defending his “cookies and milk” beddy-bve liaisons with young guests, and dangling his own child from a balcony before snapping paparazzi. Stranger and stranger he seemed -- despite his friend/goddess Elizabeth Taylor‘s protestations that Michael was “the least weird” person she knew (a scary thought) -- until our sense of the music, the performances, the raison d‘etre for his whole life, began to fade away almost as steadily and unsettlingly, as the natural black from his skin.
     
But This Is It gives Michael Jackson, pop prince and tabloid pariah, a  posthumous victory. Filled with his music, packed with his dance-steps, saturated with his creative work, the movie, in the end, says rather convincingly that it’s only Jackson’s music that matters now, only his feral showmanship and his private mindscape of moon walking, shape shifting and shadow dancing. That’s what we‘re left with: the wicked pulse of “Beat It,” the dreamy throb of “Billie Jean” and the butterfly lilt of “Human Nature” --wrapped up tight in show biz razzle and dazzle. The creative mysteries and dark secrets behind and within him are now locked up, maybe forever. Only the songs and the show stay sharply in view.     
   
That’s what gives This Is It, a value that the lost, unrealized concert movie (robbed from us by Jackson’s death) wouldn’t have had -- though it certainly would have had more wild excitement and overwhelming glitter and glitz. Instead, we get to peek into his creative workshop, see him polishing the numbers, toiling and gabbing with his collaborators. At one point, he caps a little tiff with musical supervisor/keyboardist Michael Bearden, by snapping that he wants Bearden to do his song “The way I wrote it.“
    
It becomes obvious that Jackson is his own auteur and no puppet, even though lots of his signature dance moves -- the juts, the thrusts, the whirls and sags -- made him seem like one, as did his fancy Halloween night costumes and Joker-like makeup. 
    
Rehearsals are sometimes more interesting and even more artistic than actual performances, precisely because they show the performers responding not to the crowd, but to each other, bouncing off ideas and perfecting moves. That’s what we get here with Jackson and company: a peek into the puppet factory and the toy workshop, a look inside his head. Around him, all his co-workers -- including Ortega, who gets a lot of camera time -- spin in his orbit. At the center -- sometimes calm, sometimes nervous, very skinny but full of life -- he spins to his own tunes, while twitching the marionette strings on some of his fellows.   
     
Kenny Ortega is a good director of musicals, even though I hated his recent would-be piece de resistance, High School Musical 3. He was Francis Ford Coppola‘s choreographer in One From the Heart and dance master for John Hughes in the ‘80s, and he even made a decent stab at a classical Hollywood musical in the much-dissed Disney Newsies. This is Ortega’s best movie, and it’s partly because he’s in the ideal position to see and recall everything from the beginning and then to fashion the final cut. I could have done without the Chorus Line allusions -- no two shows could be more different -- but it’s good to have somebody so skilled at musicals, someone who knows the show and its movement so well to wrap it up, and to help his star to his last curtain call.
       
This Is It makes you reminisce a bit, about kingdoms lost and maybe regained. Jacko may have been the great pop star-phenom of the ‘80s -- as was Bing Crosby in the ‘30s, Frank Sinatra in the ‘40s, Elvis in the ‘50s, and The Beatles in the ‘60s. But, despite all his chart tops and smashes, he was no second Elvis. He didn’t have that other King’s surly cojones or greasy sexuality and Jacko’s imitations of a bad boy lacked danger or sting.
      
Also, unlike those others, he never projected an adult self or street savvy beneath his kid dreams. They were always the dreams of childhood or early teenhood, which is what made him such a curious idol, such a source of cultural vertigo. Perhaps that’s why, unlike all those others, even briefly the Fab Four, he never became a true movie star. (Maybe now, he will.) 
     
It’s a fact that some great entertainers are only truly at home and only really live out their lives fully on stage (or screen) -- and chief among them were both Jacko and that other great child star turned incandescent show biz diva, Judy Garland. If Michael lacked that eventual maturity of a Bing, a Frank, or even a John and Paul, what he did have, in spades, was Judy’s supreme stage magic, and show biz chops --  in his case, a little more in his dancing (in a class by itself) than in his singing. He also had her overwhelming vulnerability and, it seems, some of her talent for self-destruction.
      
It’s fitting that, like Judy, Michael played in a movie musical based on The Wizard of Oz (The Wiz), though they gave him the wrong role. Instead of the Scarecrow, Jacko would have been much better as a male Dorothy. (Diana Ross should have been Glinda.) If Michael was no Elvis, he was no Ray Bolger either. But like Garland, he was the monarch of dreamland and master of the rainbow, child/ruler of the arena -- probably most alive when the band started playing and the fans started screaming.
     
The band is there in This is It, but not the fans. We can sense them outside the gates, though. We can feel the quiet roar that doesn‘t yet reach the ears. And we can see a bit of what the King of Pop whipped up in his dreamshop to make them roar -- even though, like Elvis, he’s left the stadium. Scream on! Dream on! Sing on! Dance on! Beat it! Just beat it!

And remember, Michael’s music and his show aren’t the prelude or precursor to life. Or the respite from it. For the King of Pop, they are life. All there is. All there was. This is it.    
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The House of the Devil (Three Stars)
U. S.; Ti West, 2009
     
If you’re tired of horror movies that increasingly just pile on the gore and guts, fling corpses at you from the first few minutes on, and try to turn the audience into a mob of screaming banshees, throwing away their money and howling for blood, Ti West‘s The House of the Devil is probably as good an alternative as the mass audience can get right now. 
       
That doesn’t mean that it’s a return to the style, subtlety and sophistication of the high-literate Val Lewton classics of the ‘40s (Cat People, I Walked with a  Zombie. The Seventh Victim and The Body Snatcher.) No such luck.
    
Instead House of the Dead, made by another kind of low-budget horror auteur, Ti West, is a different kind of bloody throwback, done in the more restrained attack and mood (compared to today) of the ‘70s, the era of moody and violent low-budgeters like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Halloween. 
 
It’s a retro shocker, with sweet-faced, tight-jeaned Jocelin Donahue as the menaced babysitter Samantha, and Tom Noonan, Marty Woronov, Danielle Noe and AJ Bowen as the Ulman clan that menaces her.
     
What are these spooky-looking people after? Blood? Sex? Violence? Box office? It’s no shock to get the tip that the villains here may be devil-worshippers because the movie begins with a title about satanic cults. But, like Hitchcock, writer-director-editor West (who made the good, tense human prey shocker Trigger Man), is more interested in suspense than surprise.

Here, he spends a good deal of time just setting the stage -- introducing us to Sam and her sardonic rich-girl buddy Megan (Greta Gerwig), planting a possible red herring in prospective landlady Dee Wallace (a “Poltergeist” vet beaming sunny good will), opening up when Sam spots a babysitter ad on a campus message board that will eventually loose the floodgates to movie hell, and then plunging us into the ultra-creepy Ulman home.  (If Donohue is a fetching heroine, Noonan, Woronov and Bowen  and West composed a truly loony and macabre household.)
    
West then spends even more scene-setting time establishing Sam’s increasing vulnerability until the inevitable moment he springs the satanic trap. But even then, unlike most modern horror directors, he doesn’t give us (comparatively) torrents of bloodshed. It’s clear that what most interests him is the buildup, and he’s a master of it. Remember: that’s where the art of suspense lies and that‘s what we often miss. The big flaw in many modern horror movies (artistically, if not financially), is that they’re scanty on buildup, too loaded with payoff, all carnage all the time.
    
It seems a little goofy that we can now look at the horror movies of the ‘70s, which then seemed to be crossing all violence thresholds, as even comparatively restrained.  Do we long with sophistication for the good old days of  “Night of the Living Dead” when marauding corpses had more savoir faire? Yearn with learned fervor for the golden days of “Halloween“ when sexy gals were slaughtered with more elan? Not exactly. But “House of the Devil,” if not quite  a classic, shows what happens, when you set the stage right before blowing it up, introduce us to the people before ripping loose with the chainsaws. As in “Trigger Man,” Ti West knows how to set up his prey for the kill.  

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Labor Day (Three Stars)
U.S.; Glenn Silber, 2009
      
If you're getting sick and tired of the tireless character assassination, union-bashing, minority-baiting, phony flag-waving, and vicious Red Scare propaganda  of  right wing TV/radio rabble-rousers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the Whole Sick Crew, and if you're fed up with all the slanted news, hypocrisy and blatant GOP cheerleading on the so-called "fair" and "balanced" Fox News, Labor Day is a great antidote.
      
Made by Glenn Silber, the Oscar-nominated co-director of The War at Home, it's a good, powerful, joyous, and finally inspiring look at one labor union's (the SEIU's) fight to elect Barack Obama President in 2008. Watch it and remember what political passion, populism and dedication are all about.

A caveat: Glenn is a longtime friend of mine, and we both hail from the University of Wisconsin-Madison film community. But old college ties don’t matter than much. Dick Cheney was on campus at about the same time, and I’ll bet he couldn’t make a movie any better than he could run a country. (Opens this week at Facets Cinematheque.)         

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- Michael Wilmington
October 29, 2009

Recent Columns

10.22.09- Amelia, Cirque duFreak: The Vampire's Assistant, Motherhood, (Untitled)
10.15.09 - Where the Wild Things Are, Law Abiding Citizen, Couples Retreat, A Serious Man
9.24.09 -Capitalism: A Love Story, Fame, Bright Star
9.17.09 -The Informant! and Love Happens and Disgrace
9.11.09 9, Whiteout and No Impact Man
9.03.09 Extract and All About Steve
8.27.09 - Play the Game, Still Walking
8.20.09 - Inglourious Basterds, The Marc Pease Experience, Post Grad
8.13.09 - The Time Traveler's Wife, Ponyo, and Bandslam
8.6.09 - Julie and Julia and A Perfect Getaway
7.30.09 - Funny People Plus, Thirst, Adam, and Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg
7.23.09- Orphan, The Ugly Truth, The Answer Man, Shrink, Katyn
7.16.09- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, (500) Days of Summer, Three Monkeys
7.9.09 - Humpday, Soul Power and Il Divo
7.2.09- Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Hurt Locker, The Girl from Monaco
6.25.09 - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, My Sister's Keeper, Cheri
6.18.09 - Whatever Works, The Proposal, The Taking of Pelham 123
6.11.09- Away We Go, Moon, Food, Inc.
6.04.09 - The Hangover, Land of the Lost, My Life in Ruins
5.28.09- Up, Drag Me to Hell, Departures, Outrage
5.21.09 - Terminator Salvation, Night at the Museum 2, Dance Flick, Easy Virtue
5.14.09 - Angels and Demons, Summer Hours, The Brothers Bloom
5.07.09 - Star Trek, Next Day Air, The Limits of Control, Rudo y Cursi, Battle for Terra
4.30.09 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Hunger
4.23.09 - The Soloist, The Informers, Tyson and Fighting
4.16.09 - State of Play, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, American Violet, Is Anybody There, The Song of Sparrows
4.09.09 - Observe and Report, Hannah Montana: The Movie, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gigantic, and Sin Nombre
4.02.09 - Fast & Furious, Silent Light, Sugar, Adventureland, and Paris 36
3.26.09 - Monsters Vs. Aliens, The Haunting in Connecticut, Z, and Shall We Kiss?

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