I imagine people are chatting in the Grammy forum, but this is a movie, it is getting reviews, and many of us never venture over there.

Very positive from Variety:

Michael Jackson's This Is It

(Documentary) A Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a Columbia Pictures presentation in association with the Michael Jackson Co. and AEG Live. Produced by Randy Phillips, Kenny Ortega, Paul Gongaware. Executive producers, John Branca, John McClain. Co-producers, Chantal Feghali, Frank Dileo. Directed by Kenny Ortega.

With: Michael Jackson, Kenny Ortega, Michael Bearden, Travis Payne, Judith Hill, Orianthi Panagaris, Tommy Organ, Mo Pleasure, Stacy Walker, Tony Testa.


By ANDREW BARKERHad Michael Jackson’s series of concerts at London’s O2 Arena gone off as planned earlier this summer, it would have almost certainly signaled one of the most dramatic comebacks in pop music history. The rehearsal footage on display in “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” is evidence enough to draw that conclusion, providing a solid basis to imagine the final product while also giving a heretofore unseen glimpse of the star’s creative process -- and the latter is both the film’s greatest strength and its most troubling element. Worldwide box office after Sony’s midweek bow should be monstrous.
Despite the grotesque and unceasing curiosity over his private life, Jackson’s working procedure was scarcely documented, and his intense perfectionism is breathtaking to see here. He corrects his dancers while in the midst of striking poses himself, pores over video footage and auditions, works out with a vocal coach and gives his band instructions that are alternately brilliant (“Play it like you’re dragging yourself out of bed”) and Kafka-esque in their impenetrability.

(After a fascinating exchange with keyboardist and musical director Michael Bearden over an almost imperceptibly subtle tempo change on “The Way You Make Me Feel,” Bearden delicately notes that he can’t always predict how Jackson will want certain songs to sound. Jackson snaps back, “I want it like I wrote it.”)

Yet there’s likely a reason that so little of this side of Jackson was ever seen previously; the more one observes his anxiety-riddled drive to present a flawless performance, the more obvious it seems that he would never have wanted audiences to see it in such a rough state. Debating a deceased artist’s wishes is always sketchy territory, however, and “This Is It” is a classy film that only affirms the man’s talent. Yet one can’t help but worry that, rather than a bittersweet farewell, the film will merely serve as the opening salvo to a flood of posthumous releases and merchandising that will make Tupac Shakur’s estate seem a paragon of restraint.

But avant le deluge, there’s an incredible amount to enjoy here, and the star’s fans will be in rapture. Though Jackson looks painfully thin at times, his vocal prowess and dancing ability seem to have scarcely ebbed at all in the decade he spent offstage. His singing during “Human Nature” is strong and emotive, his dancing during an extended “Billie Jean” sublime. (“At least we got a feel for it,” he demurs immediately after the latter, and the comment reads more like genuine misplaced self-consciousness than the typical feigned humility of a pop star.)

Director Kenny Ortega’s ultimate vision for the show is fleshed out further with glimpses of interstitial video -- the intro to “Smooth Criminal,” which splices a fedora’d Jackson onto vintage footage of Rita Hayworth and Edward G. Robinson, is particularly inspired -- and computer simulations of staging concepts that never made it to fruition. (These completed sketches are never shown in their entirety, however, and it’s not unreasonable to imagine that they’ll be the hook for the inevitable deluxe-edition DVD.)

Video and audio quality are of a much higher caliber than the phrase “rehearsal footage” might suggest, although occasionally the filmmakers are forced to cobble together subpar bits and pieces (most notably on “Thriller”). Conversely, the edits of “Beat It” and “Black or White” presented here could practically be released as is and still blow most contemporary pop videos out of the water.

The sole moment when the singer seems irritable or disengaged from the proceedings occurs during a mini-set of three Jackson 5 tunes, the timing of which seems psychologically revealing at first, though it later turns out to be due to monitor malfunction. Indeed, one rarely forgets that these are rehearsals, and at times Jackson visibly holds back, protesting about the need to save his voice for his upcoming performances -- one of several instances in which knowledge of the man’s imminent death overshadows the joy of watching him perform.

Members of the band, crew and dance troupe appear on camera between songs to gush (often while tearing up) about the honor of appearing with Jackson. While it’s hard to doubt their sincerity, it all seems a bit creepy when one remembers that this footage was originally intended for Jackson’s personal use.

“This Is It” is assembled with great care that belies its impromptu nature, and editors Don Brochu, Brandon Key, Tim Patterson and Kevin Stitt have done excellent work to pull together a coherent film from endless footage -- even at nearly two hours, the film still feels too short. Original concert production directed by Ortega, Michael Jackson, in association with Travis Payne. Camera (Deluxe color), Tim Patterson, Sandrine Orabona; editors, Don Brochu, Brandon Key, Patterson, Kevin Stitt; music/music supervisor, Michael Bearden; production designer, Michael Cotton; lighting designer, Patrick Woodroffe; costume designers, Zaldy, Topaz Erin Lareau, Dennis Tompkins, Michael Bush; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), William Sheppell Jr.; supervising sound editor, Tricia Linklater; re-recording mixers, Paul Massey, David Giammarco; choreography, Jackson, Payne; visual effects supervisor, Bruce Jones; associate producers, Bearden, Payne. Reviewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Los Angeles, Oct. 27, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 111 MIN.

God, I am so freaking sick of Michael Jackson.

Didn't like him when he was alive, like him even less now that he's dead.

Thanks for sharing.

Could this film be nominated for best documentary?

"Woodstock" is the only concert film I know of that won best documentary but it is also the only one that occurs to be as having been a nominee. Great concert films like "The Last Waltz", "Gimme Shelter" and "Stop Making Sense" were not nominated.

No - not for this year at least - it is too late; they have an earlier deadline for initial showing.

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
No - not for this year at least - it is too late; they have an earlier deadline for initial showing.

Do all concert films qualify as documentaries? Is it just prejudice amongst documentarians that keep them from being nominated much?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

They can be submitted, but yes since they suffer from not seeming to have a "purpose" or "message".

Stop Making Sense and The Last Waltz are both great or near-great films which are documentaries, but never came close to being nominated.

The LATimes has a very good review (from its music critic) that doesn't seem to be up on their website despite being in the paper this AM.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,

A very positive review from CNN...

Review: 'This Is It' a Jackson triumph

By Tom Charity, Special to CNN
October 28, 2009 11:27 a.m. EDT

(CNN) -- Yes, you probably want to see this.

Kenny Ortega's record of Michael Jackson in rehearsal in the days and weeks before his untimely death in June has been a red-hot advance ticket all over the world, even while fans worried about what the film would reveal about the singer's fitness on the verge of the planned 50-date engagement at London's O2 arena.

He's as thin as a rail, so thin that his trilby looks a size too big for him. But any cynical speculation that the King of Pop headed for the exit to save himself the embarrassment of a flop -- that he wasn't just past his prime but incapable of living up to his own legend -- just won't fly.

From the evidence Ortega shows us, "This Is It: the concert" would have been as thrilling and spectacular as his audience hoped it would be. Jackson may have been broke, but this would have been a no-expense-spared extravaganza. More important, creatively, it's obvious he was far from a spent force.

Admittedly, there is no way to tell from the movie whether "MJ," as his collaborators call him, would have mustered the stamina for the demanding schedule he had signed up for.

Ortega, the choreographer-turned-director who worked with Jackson on the Dangerous World and HIStory tours, categorically has not made a cinéma vérité documentary portrait of Jackson on his last legs. This is no death-watch expose. Quite the opposite: It's a slick, "professional" celebration of a great entertainer at work and much more of a concert film than might have been expected.

Ortega dates the first scenes as April 2009 but leaves it at that. The rehearsal footage, we're told, was shot for Jackson's private library -- and there's a lot of it (the entire show, probably), a dozen of the greatest hits filmed on two or more cameras, and often across at least two rehearsals.

This is augmented by relatively brief clips from filmed segments intended for use in the concert, including a new 3-D "Thriller" video and a film noir number that puts a monochrome Michael on the run from trigger-happy Humphrey Bogart ("Smooth Criminal").

There are also sensibly brief interviews with the show's dancers and musicians, none of whom sheds any insight on Jackson the man or the artist but all of whom attest to his incredible charisma.

Happily, we can see that for ourselves. At 50, Jackson wasn't a pretty young thing any longer; close-ups confirm what a terrible travesty he'd made of his face, with his cleft Kirk Douglas chin and a nose that looks like a cartoonist's impression of a skate ramp. But this inspired dancer still had the moves, and even when he's singing well within himself (which is most of the time, here) we can appreciate his fine phrasing, his superb sense of rhythm.

Maybe the movie's greatest pleasure is witnessing how he gently, firmly coaxes out the sound he's hearing in his head from his musical collaborators: insisting on a longer pause or a funkier bass or more dramatic punctuation. "Rapport" would be too intimate a word -- royalty remains untouchable, and not even Ortega seems comfortable putting his arm around Michael's shoulders -- but Jackson could communicate musical ideas with a joy and exuberance that anyone can understand.

His cast and crew, who were also his last live audience, invariably light up whenever Jackson is performing.

And always the sound and the staging seem indivisible in his mind. It shouldn't come as any surprise, but after decades of idle tabloid gossip, lies and innuendo, it's a relief to be reminded of Jackson's prodigious talent, the consummate care and craftsmanship underneath all the razzmatazz.

The performances here are not the finished article. He wasn't, evidently, a man to show up at rehearsals in jeans and T-shirt, but for one rehearsal he sports bright orange trousers and a silver lamé jacket; at another, a red shirttail hangs half in, half out of his trousers. There are mistakes, modifications, mild disgruntlement -- though we're never shown anything resembling a temper tantrum.

"That's why we rehearse," Jackson murmurs more than once, sanguine that everything will be all right on the night.

It wasn't to be. We'll never experience Jackson's "final curtain call" as he envisaged it for himself. But "This Is It" gives us a glimpse of a more human Michael Jackson than the King of Pop ever presented in his lifetime. Imperfection suits him better than he knew.

A grade B review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Owen Gleiberman

Michael Jackson always said that he wished he could live on stage, and in Michael Jackson's This Is It, there isn't a moment when he looks less than comfortably and pleasurably at home there. On the vast, half-empty, often darkened proscenium of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where we see him in bare-bones videotaped rehearsals for the 50 London concerts that he never lived to perform, Jackson moves lightly and easily, with his herky-jerky demon-marionette grace. On the rare occasions when he's not focused on dance moves and has nothing to do but sing, as in a soaring interlude of ''Human Nature'' or a version of ''I Want You Back'' that he tosses off with affection for his child-superstar pluck, the music pours out of him like sunlight.

This Is It is not in any way ghoulish. It has now been established that when Jackson died, he was, physically speaking, a relatively healthy man. And so we're spared the macabre spectacle of combing the movie for any literal signs that he was knocking at death's door. It should also be said, though, that in This Is It, Jackson shows no telltale signs of a broken spirit, either. From the moment he takes the stage, he's loose, robust, and in control. Maybe a little too in control. In the relative privacy of these rehearsal sessions, which took place from March of this year until his death on June 25, Jackson comes off as his friends have often described him — as a gentle, sweet, but very shrewd soul who was also a painful perfectionist. Coaching his keyboardist and musical director, Michael Bearden, on how to play ''The Way You Make Me Feel'' with the exact right syncopated pull, Jackson says that he wants the song to sound ''like you're dragging yourself out of bed,'' but Bearden can't seem to get it. Though they banter a bit about the word ''booty,'' we get a hint of what a frosty taskmaster Jackson could be. When he's displeased, it stings.

As the last set of images we'll ever have of Michael Jackson, This Is It offers a raw and endearing sketch of a genius at work. The movie was directed, by Kenny Ortega, with enough liveliness to make up for its home-movie scruffiness, and I had a good time reveling in what amounts to a soft-edged vérité scrapbook for Michael-maniacs. By the end, though, This Is It feels like the half-complete experience that it is — a mere diagram of the excitement that Michael, for his comeback, had planned to unleash upon the world.

It's clear from the movie that the London concerts were conceived as a very grand series of onstage music videos, each with a huge, intricate set that at times involved digital projections, and each choreographed as a disco-inferno Broadway showstopper. (''Thriller,'' one of the few songs we watch as it was meant to be, had a full earth-packed graveyard.) The dancers were going to pop out from beneath the stage and crawl over skyscrapers, as Michael shimmied and boogied and got lifted into the air. Watching this without most of the sets, with the gears and pulleys still showing, and from two functional camera angles in front of the stage, we get the flavor of the songs but not the majesty.

And that's not just due to the lack of trappings. Jackson, it's clear, held back in rehearsal. In This Is It, he's singing and dancing, but he's also watching himself sing and dance, stepping out of his performance. What's missing — what the film gives you only a tantalizing glimpse of — is his ferocity. When he does a tamped-down version of his solo whirligig in ''Billie Jean,'' playing air guitar on his crotch (a gesture that elicits a round of cheers from the dancers in the Staples Center), you feel him sketching in the heat without quite committing himself. ''At least we get a feel of it,'' he says.

This Is It is fun, but it's a slightly airless experience. If the movie allows you to bask in Michael Jackson's aura, it also uses his image to foster ''nostalgia'' for a concert epiphany that never quite was. Maybe it was Michael's destiny to leave us all wanting more. Would those concerts have returned him to his magical pedestal? We'll never know the answer, of course. But watching this movie, at least we get a feel of it. B

A * review from Lou Lumenick in the NEW YORK POST...

Neither a concert film nor a documentary but a ghoulish “event” offered just in time for Halloween, “This is It” is sadly — and reprehensively, if you ask me — the movie equivalent to the National Enquirer’s infamous post-mortem shot of Elvis Presley.

Cynically billed as a tribute to Michael Jackson and a gift to his fans, this much-hyped rip-off resurrects the dying former King of Pop in a likely successful bid by the promoters of his abortive final concert tour, his relatives and his longtime enablers at Sony to cash in on Jackson’s post-mortem surge in popularity.
In “This Is It,” Michael Jackson is an off-key, sickly, incoherent ghoulish mess.

In “This Is It,” Michael Jackson is an off-key, sickly, incoherent ghoulish mess.

“This Is It” was hastily cobbled together from often badly photographed and recorded rehearsal footage never intended to be shown to an audience, hokey backstage scenes that were, and elaborate 3-D sequences that were shot for use in the concerts (and are shown here in 2-D).

Amid a considerable amount of filler, we have the painful sight and sound of Jackson days before his death of a drug overdose. He looks alarmingly frail, his impassive face appearing older than his 50 years. His once glorious voice, reduced to a hoarse whisper — when he speaks, there are often subtitles — frequently fails to hit notes, much less hold them.

At first, it seems the voice has returned for an elaborate re-staging of “Thriller” — and then it becomes clear he’s lip-synching to a decades-old soundtrack.

The greatest dancer of his time before a decade lost in tabloid hell, Jackson moves stiffly and lethargically, suggesting even a shadow of his former self in the movie’s only half-decent number, “Beat It.”

There’s no polite way of saying that his wizened appearance is alarming; he’s bone-thin and your eye is constantly drawn to a nose like none that occurs in nature. At one point, the weary-looking Jackson launches into a long harangue about having trouble hearing; his vocals are frequently drowned out by the orchestra.

Kenny Ortega, a longtime Jackson collaborator who was directing the stage production, also called “This Is It,” is credited as director of this morbid patch job.

Like a cinematic Dr. Frankenstein, he culls semi-usable footage from as many as three rehearsals (based on Jackson’s outfits) for a single number.

Jackson looks incongruous, to say the least, next to re-purposed footage of Humphrey Bogart and Rita Hayworth in a new black-and-white version of “Smooth Criminal.” The hokey environmental visuals accompanying “Earth Song” are even worse.

Could Jackson and his collaborators have whipped this show into shape for a triumphant comeback in London if he had lived? The evidence here says no, but we’ll never really know.

But I feel fairly confident that a perfectionist like Jackson would never want to be remembered by a shoddy piece of exploitation like “This Is It.”

A positive review from Richard Corliss in TIME...

Death and resurrection. That's the scenario not just for gods but for pop stars who earn fans' ardor with an electrifying presence and their sympathy with very public private lives of addiction and misbehavior. The stars' talent makes them unique; their transgressions make them human. Michael Jackson, who died in June at age 50, outlived Edith Piaf and Judy Garland by three years, and Elvis by eight. (Forget Madonna — that woman is too smart to self-immolate.) Jackson's bizarre resculpting of his features, his litigious shenanigans with his youngest admirers, his obsession with being an eternal preadolescent, a petrified Peter Pan: all these eccentricities gave him an otherworldly cast. It took death to restore his standing as one-of-a-kind entertainer — to bring him back to life. (See TIME's full Michael Jackson coverage.)

Jackson is hot again. His old albums — now sacred relics, for which the faithful did not pay so much as tithe — sold better after his death this summer than they had in this millennium. A poll of visitors to the Fandango website showed that the No. 1 movie costume for this weekend's Halloween revelers would be Michael Jackson. The singer, whose worldwide success was built on CDs and concerts, not movies, became his own fictional character. And like the runners-up — Wolverine from the X-Men films and the Twilight series' Edward — Jackson is a hero from the dark side. (See this year's top 10 Halloween costumes.)

But full redemption, not to mention true resurrection, requires a personal appearance. And on the 125th day he rose from the dead, at least on screen, with Michael Jackson's This Is It, a docu-musical record of the star's rehearsals for his comeback London concert series that was to begin in July. Sony, the music and movie conglomerate that has had a decades-long stake in Jackson's economic fortunes, shrouded the project in mystery until its premiere, which was held simultaneously on Tuesday night and Wednesday in 16 cities around the globe. (Sony took over all 13 auditoriums of the Regal E-Walk Theater on New York City's 42nd Street to show the movie to 3,200 invitees.) Many of the venues had a satellite feed from the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, where director Kenny Ortega, who had also been in charge of the planned concert, greeted surviving Jackson brothers Jermaine, Marlon, Tito and Jackie. (Read a Q&A with director Kenny Ortega.)

The only pre-premiere insights to the film came from two people who had been close to Jackson. His father Joe told the British tabloid News of the World, "This movie features body doubles, no doubt about it." (Given Joe's wrangles with his family and with AEG, the concert's promoters, he may not be an unimpeachable source.) Michael's stalwart buddy Elizabeth Taylor, who attended an early screening last week, effusively tweeted that This Is It was "the single most brilliant piece of filmmaking I have ever seen." And she was in The Sandpiper.

So what is This Is It? A concert film without the concert. A backstage musical that takes place almost entirely onstage. A no-warts hagiography that still gets the audience closer to the real Michael Jackson — MJ the performer, that is — than anything in the man's avidly documented history. Wisely and decently ignoring the circumstances of his death and the circus that followed it, Ortega focuses on the re-creation of about a dozen Jackson standards for the concert. ("Beat It," "Billie Jean," "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," "Black and White" and "I'll Be There" are all here.) At times several takes of a song are edited into one performance; you know because Jackson is sporting different rehearsal clothes. The footage was shot so the star could study his work and that of his crew, thus it has the artlessness of visual stenography. The art is in what we're privileged to watch: a perfectionist who quietly pushes himself to prove he's still got it.

A *** out of **** from Michael Phillips in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE...

How much of "Michael Jackson’s This Is It" can we believe?

Was Jackson, 50 at the time of his death on June 25, in rougher shape overall than the concert rehearsal footage assembled here suggests? Most certainly, yes. Produced with the full, watchful cooperation of the Jackson estate, pulled from 100-plus hours of film and video shot between March and June 2009, "This Is It" has no interest in telling the full story of anything, or the crumbling state of anyone.

Rather, director Kenny Ortega — Jackson’s partner in staging the London concert that never came to fruition — is simply trying to suggest in some detail what sort of overstuffed career retrospective Jackson was attempting in this phantom arena affair. Naivete, calculation and all, it looks like it would’ve been a helluva show, complete with eco-consciousness-raising, an onstage bulldozer and 3-D "Thriller" footage, newly created to dazzle audiences left high and dry by fate and Jackson’s demise.

"This Is It" is best taken as a bittersweet celebration of Jackson the dancer, the greatest popular dancer since Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly or at least James Brown. When he revisits "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," we see someone who never really grew into any kind of visually recognizable adulthood, belonging to no easily recognizable notion of manhood. But the quicksilver limbs and perpetually busy hands (penguin flippers one second, rotating pinwheels the next, never at ease) were Jackson’s way of expressing what he expressed best.

He was a man both confined and liberated by movement, and "This Is It" constitutes a farewell to, and from, that man. He was the only entertainer who, within four bars, could do the mashed potato followed by the moonwalk followed by seven other moves that never really had a name.

The self-made and then self-remade performer surrounded himself with a great group of backup dancers for this concert. Ortega’s film showcases their efforts. There’s a "Chorus Line" bit at the beginning where we see the cattle call, then the principals selected for the top slots, plus lots of testimonials from dancers addressing the camera on the subject of what Jacko means to them. You forgive the cliches because the dance footage makes this movie. (Though even Ortega might agree: A sharper-minded concert film might’ve weeded out the blather a little.)

The way Jackson interacts with Ortega ("yeah, I totally agree, Michael!" he says at one point in rehearsal, trying not to sound like a sycophant), or any of the army of collaborators, the audience can piece bits of Jackson’s personality together. He is coy, nonchalant, controlling, a trouper, a sweetheart, a poseur — sometimes all at once. We rarely see the performer in close-up, and the choice seems deliberate; that face was not his greatest piece of self-reinvention, only his most apparent. But in the film’s longest extended take, when Jackson duets on "I Just Can’t Stop Loving You" with Judith Hill, we see how this performer used a vocal rehearsal to explore, and figure things out, and match his somewhat fraying voice to what he was thinking in terms of movement. He could dance brilliantly right up to the end, it’s clear. "This Is It" may be a court documentary, but as a heavily lawyered portrait of an artist, it’s still pretty compelling.

A **** review from Roger Ebert...

"This is it," Michael Jackson told his fans in London, announcing his forthcoming concert tour. "This is the final curtain call." The curtain fell sooner than expected. What is left is this extraordinary documentary, nothing at all like what I was expecting to see. Here is not a sick and drugged man forcing himself through grueling rehearsals, but a spirit embodied by music. Michael Jackson was something else.

The film has been assembled from rehearsals from April through June 2009 for a concert tour scheduled for this summer. The footage was "captured by a few cameras," an opening screen tells us, but they were professional high-def cameras and the sound track is full-range stereo. The result is one of the most revealing music documentaries I've seen.

And it's more than that. It's a portrait of Michael Jackson that belies all the rumors that he would have been too weak to tour. That shows not the slightest trace of a spoiled prima donna. That benefits from the limited number of cameras by allowing us to experience his work in something closer to realistic time, instead of fracturing it into quick cuts. That provides both a good idea of what the final concert would have looked like, and a portrait of the artist at work.

Never raising his voice, never showing anger, always soft-spoken and courteous to his cast and crew, Michael with his director, Kenny Ortega, micro-manages the production. He corrects timing, refines cues, talks about details of music and dance. Seeing him always from a distance, I thought of him as the instrument of his producing operation. Here we see that he was the auteur of his shows.

We know now that Michael was subjected to a ****tail of drugs in the time leading up to his fatal overdose, including the last straw, a drug so dangerous it should only be administered by an anesthesiologist in an operating room. That knowledge makes it hard to understand how he appears to be in superb physical condition. His choreography, built from such precise, abrupt and perfectly-timed movements, is exhausting, but he never shows a sign of tiring. His movements are so well synchronized with the other dancers on stage, who are much younger and highly-trained, that he seems one with them. This is a man in such command of his physical instrument that he makes spinning in place seem as natural as blinking his eye.

He has always been a dancer first, and then a singer. He doesn't specialize in solos. With the exception of a sweet love ballad, his songs all incorporate four backup singers and probably supplementary tracks prerecorded by himself. It is the whole effect he has in mind.

It might have been a hell of a show. Ortega and special effects wizards coordinate pre-filmed sequences with the stage work. There's a horror-movie sequence with ghouls rising from a cemetery (and ghosts that were planned to fly above the audience). Michael is inserted into scenes from Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart movies, and through clever f/x even has a machine-gun battle with Bogie. His environmental pitch is backed by rain forest footage. He rides a cherry-picker high above the audience.

His audience in this case consists entirely of stagehands, gaffers, technicians, and so on. These are working people who have seen it all. They love him. They're not pretending. They love him for his music, and perhaps even more for his attitude. Big stars in rehearsal are not infrequently pains in the ass. Michael plunges in with the spirit of a co-worker, prepared to do the job and go the distance.

How was that possible? Even if he had the body for it, which he obviously did, how did he muster the mental strength? When you have a doctor on duty around the clock to administer the prescription medications you desire, when your idea of a good sleep is reportedly to be unconscious for 24 hours, how do you wake up into such a state of keen alertness? Uppers? I don't think it quite works that way. I was watching like a hawk for any hint of the effects of drug abuse, but couldn't see any. Perhaps it's significant that of all the people in the rehearsal space, he is the only one whose arms are covered at all times by long sleeves.

Well, we don't know how he did it. "This Is It" is proof that he did do it. He didn't let down his investors and colleagues. He was fully prepared for his opening night. He and Kenny Ortega, who also directed this film, were at the top of their game. There's a moving scene on the last day of rehearsal when Jackson and Ortega join hands in a circle with all the others, and thank them. But the concert they worked so hard on was never to be.

This is it.

A positive review from Kirk Honeycutt in the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

Bottom Line: An absorbing glimpse at a concert that, tragically, never happened.
Looks like the world has missed one helluva concert. Whatever cynicism one might harbor about this Hail Mary piece of cinema -- which can be called the first concert rehearsal movie ever -- what this strange yet strangely beguiling film does is capture one of pop culture's great entertainers in the feverish grips of pure creativity. The screen is filed with performers, musicians, choreographers, crew members and craftsmen, but the movie's laserlike focus is on Jackson. You understand what it takes to attain such dizzying heights in entertainment -- and perhaps why he chose to stay away for a decade.

Following its simultaneous premieres Tuesday, the film will open on more than 3,400 domestic screens along with 96 in Imax theaters and another 27 internationally for a two-week run. That run will be extended if demand is there. Demand will be there.

In case someone just dropped in from Mars, "This Is It" was to be 50-year-old Michael Jackson's final comeback, a planned run of 50 sold-out concerts that were to take place at London's O2 Arena over the summer -- all of which came to a sudden and tragic end with the performer's death on June 25.

Kenny Ortega, the director of the stage show, has put together this movie from 120 hours of digital video footage -- for which Sony reportedly paid $60 million -- taken during rehearsals at the Staples Center in Los Angeles between March and June of this year along with casting sessions at the Nokia Theatre and video sequences filmed on the Sony lot.

What strikes you is how thoroughly professional, even slick, this footage is. Whatever it was intended for -- a making-of doc to accompany the concert DVD, or a television show? -- this is no footage rounded up from the crew's cell phones. Interviews with the cast, musicians and production personnel further underscore a clear intent to go public with this material.

Whatever the case, how fascinating it is to watch a huge, complicated concert take shape. Make no mistake this was a show intended for a stadium with a dazzling, mixed-media staging. One can even imagine a music critic in London fuming about overproduced numbers that don't trust Jackson's great song catalog to deliver the goods.

On the other hand, this production may have been just right in scale for the O2 Arena. Dancers pop up through trap doors in elevators operating at "toaster speed." A bulldozer rumbles on stage for a "green" number about saving rain forests.

Shooting in front of a Sony green screen, 11 male dancers are transformed into 11 million. Jackson gets mixed into old, black-and-white movie footage so he can admire Rita Hayworth's wiggle in front of an orchestra and dance around bullets shot by Edward Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.

Split screens convey Jackson, nearly always in sunglasses, performing the same number on different days with different wardrobes and different approaches. There's no question who the director is here. Jackson is in complete control. Ortega watches over the production while Jackson manages every moment onstage. His directions are almost poetic. About the tempo of one number, he instructs, "It's like you're dragging yourself out of bed." Another time, he says, "It has to simmer."

The audience at the Nokia premiere didn't seem to know how to react to rehearsal footage. They giggled nervously at missed cues and interruptions. To be clear: No one should expect a concert film. Jackson clearly is conserving his energy, holding back on dance moves and vocal intensity. He is searching for his concert, the way a sculptor chisels away at marble to discover a statue.

Interestingly, two of his best songs, "Billie Jean" and "Man in the Mirror," look like they were going to be staged simply. Then again, perhaps Ortega is showing early footage before the addition of dancers and singers. There's no way to tell.

The frustration, beyond the greater one -- that a tragedy prevented this concert from happening -- is not knowing what you're looking at. Where are Jackson and his conspirators at any given moment in the creative process? The film tries to be a concert film without having the actual footage. So when everything comes to a halt, audiences get thrown.

"This Is It" is not a "sacred document," as Ortega asserted to the Nokia crowd. But it is a fascinating one. It shows a songwriter-performer who knows his material intimately. While not always certain what he wants, he knows it immediately when he gets it. At one point, Ortega asks his star how he will see a certain cue onstage. Jackson pauses and then says, "I'll feel that."

And you know he would have.

I have absolutely no interest in seeing this. But I hope for true Michael fans, they get something positive out of watching the final months/weeks of Michael as he tried to prepare for that daunting task of 50 London shows that never came to be.

Why do more than 50% of the people polled on Tom's blog think that THIS IS IT will be nominated for Best Picture and possibly win????? Does this not sound insane to anyone else?

I don't even think it'll be nominated but even if it is I just can't see it winning. At all.

Sound editing maybe.

Sounds like a poll to meant generate readership and site visits, nothing more.

Totally legitimate, but nothing meant to take seriously.

Nikki Finke says that posting Twilight items gets more links and readers than anything else she writes, even though she really doesn't care about it. This seems like the same thing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,

I really really loved it. It's my favorite movie of the year.

Whether it could be nominated for Best Picture or not, I don't know. I actually never know what those people are thinking. But if it were, I don't think it would embarrass anyone. It's really neatly put together. If the Academy would ever nominate this "type" of film, then there is NO REASON not to nominate it. So would they ever nominate a concert film is the real question IMO. If the answer is yes, this makes it in.

A ***1/2 out of **** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

Michael Jackson's perfectionism fails him in This Is It, and we're all the better for it. What we see in this unmissable two-hour concert film, culled from 120 hours of digital-video footage of Jackson rehearsing for a promised comeback that ended with his death at age 50 on June 25th, is a world-class performer trying to make the MJ on stage match the MJ in his head. Watching his struggle is illuminating, unnerving and unforgettable.

During prep time from March to June of this year, director Kenny Ortega caters to the every whim of his fragile, passive-aggressive star, knowing instinctively that yelling will only produce pouting not results. This Is It, a so-called "gift" to the fans, will disappoint anyone looking to scrutinize the scandals and facial scars that made the King of Pop a tabloid staple. Among the film's problems, exploitation for starters, are interviews with the singers, dancers and crew gathered like family around Jackson at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Their words start at worshipful and burst into a Niagara of gush. And the editing of the rehearsals into a semi-cohesive whole emphasizes the big finish over the slow build. But the Jackson onscreen is still an indisputable phenomenon.

Ortega shows us huge chunks of filmed set pieces intended for the epic concert of greatest hits that was set to open in London for 50 performances. On black-and-white celluloid for the "Smooth Criminal" number, we see zoot-suited Jackson machine-gunning it out with Bogart and catching a satin glove thrown by sexy Rita Hayworth in Gilda. "Thriller" gets the Halloween treatment with drooling graveyard ghouls, and computer wizardry turns 11 dancers into a robot army of thousands. In the godawful "Earth Song," a bulldozer decimates a forest on screen and then rolls out on stage to toss the message right in our laps. It's all shameless razzle dazzle aimed at the cheap seats.

Where This Is It triumphs is when it has the sense to keep it simple. Yes, Jackson holds back on the vocals. "Don't make me sing full out," he pleads to the crew, cheering him on in rehearsal as he duets with Judith Hill on "I Just Can't Stop Loving You." He needs to conserve his voice for the actual performance. But the slight rasp adds emotion and warmth to "Human Nature," "Man in the Mirror" and "Billie Jean" — a vulnerability rare in Jackson, who rivaled Fred Astaire in the surgical precision of his presentation. The soundtrack CD for This Is It uses the remastered original recordings, not the live versions, and I can see why. Without the visuals, the vocal flaws might seem glaring. But Jackson just going through the motions puts other performers to shame. And, oh, could that man move. The editing gives us Jackson performing the same number on different days in different clothes. But the film still feels vital and thrillingly alive. In this transcendent tribute to a performing artist flying without a safety net, death holds no sway over Michael Jackson. His soul is still dancing.