Effective Advertising and Info Management

The lights dim, the Columbia Pictures logo lady flickers on the huge screen, followed by a sight and sound buildup that could just as easily come from the p.r. department of NASA heralding the next space shuttle. NASA publicists share with the late Michael Jackson the belief that all launches should be loud and proud, that the paying public should feel that they’re definitely in a celestial presence.

Michael Jackson’s This Is It opens in another darkened theatre as an off-screen voice (director Kenny Ortega, guiding genius behind Disney’s High School Musical films) prepares us for Michael’s entrance, which involves a high-tech suit contraption which could probably operate on the lunar surface, all-too-fitting for a celestial creature best known for his “Moon Walk.” His music videos are so famous that it is pleasure to see him peform live

There are times when a new film has been so overhyped, and one’s own internal sh*t-detector so primed, that if it merely rises above crass mediocrity one feels waves of relief, and is inclined to oversing its distinctly limited merits. This Is It deserves a better fate. Bearing in mind that the material was designed for a very different context - as the backdrop and fireworks for Jackson’s scheduled 50-concert gig in London (including, possibly, a Royal audience) - what Jackson and his principal collaborator Ortega (whose artistic birthright includes working with Gene Kelly) have pulled off in this two-hour concert film (culled from hours of rehearsal footage in LA’s spaceship-like Staples Center) is rather special, and contains hints that its creator’s grandiose vision of his own artistic resurrection might not have been so wrong after all.

The movie unfolds in a series of acts or set-pieces, each of which invoke Jackson’s dazzling resume of chartbusting singles and music videos. Rolling Stone ranks Jackson second only to the Beatles and Mariah Carey for chart-topping hits (59): “Beat It,” “Thriller,” “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” “Smooth Criminal.” Jackson and Ortega re-imagine the Jackson videos that the MTV generation teethed on with a loose-limbed and talented cast of dancers and musicians, who are informed early on that they’re “an extension of Michael Jackson.” In This Is It ’s intimate prologue, “Michael’s kids” cite him as the animating inspiration for their fledgling careers, not unlike the way the teenage Jackson had once envisioned his future in the incendiary moves of funk daddy James Brown.

This Is It sparkles when the ferocious energy channeled by the kids seems to re-animate their god, and once again we witness the power of a man-child who practically invented the music video. A highlight comes when Jackson green-screens himself into the eye-line of 40s fatale Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and has his “Smooth Criminal” pursued by Humphrey Bogart. Michael Jackson often seemed caught between his slickly conceived mini-movies for the small screen and his dream to re-conceive Hollywood classics the way The Wiz had re-imagined The Wizard of Oz for an all-black cast, with Michael, barely out of his teens, as the Scarecrow.

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