Re: Michael lives

The performance sequences are impressive, and Jaafar does a good impression of his uncle. But the movie as a whole is insipid. Micheal is portrayed as unable to stand up to his abusive father (the "hero" of the film is lawyer John Branca, played by Miles Teller; not at all coincidentally Branca controls the Jackson estate which is behind the production). The implied message is that Michael was too much of an eternal child and too absorbed in his "art" (nothing in the film is persuasive about his creative process, but then few if any biopics succeed in that respect) to have ever been guilty of hurting anyone. Or, if he ever did, it must have been only because of his incapacity for confrontation. Again, this is presumably excused by his failure to mature. In the end, then, though nothing controversial, let alone bad, is ever addressed, we are invited to blame anything bad or controversial we might have heard about on Joseph (played rather masterfully by Colman Domingo as a pure villain). I have no idea what to make of the lame text at the end, "His story continues," according to Wikipedia added during post-production. Is a sequel with Neverland and boys being promised? It's difficult to imagine how that could be managed consistently with the tone of this movie. On the other hand, it pulled in $97M, characterized on Wikipedia as "the best-ever for a biographical and musical film." So the temptation to try will certainly be there. If they were to give Tom O'Carroll a few million shillings for the rights to Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons it might be nice for Tom and produce an interesting film, but I doubt this is Branca's plan. hugzu ;-p