MICHAEL Review

Michael Jackson is a complicated subject for me. Not because of why you might expect, though. Like most who have consumed any (pop) culture over the past fifty years, The Jackson 5, The Jacksons, and Michael Jackson especially have been not just a part of my life, but a large, even life-altering part. I am the oldest of five children, ten years between my youngest brother and myself with only one sister separating two sets of boys. From the time the youngest was in diapers my three brothers and I performed together. Because we were a group of singing and dancing brothers, we inevitably incorporated those record-setting first four singles from The Jackson 5 into our act. In fact, through to our final performance together in 2014, we would often end our sets with the "I Want You Back/ABC/The Love You Save" medley from the "Triumph" tour recording. This naturally branched into learning/incorporating post-Motown Jacksons records into our shows and, of course, countless solo offerings from Michael. Whether it was our "Michael" doing the whole of the "Billie Jean" routine, performing "Thriller" at every show in October, or perfecting the "Dangerous" routine from the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards for my senior year talent show, the amount of artistry this single human being encompassed was not lost on me. As I matured, I was confronted with the allegations leveled against Jackson and though I don't overlook or discount this aspect of the individual Michael Jackson was they are very much not a part of the story this film is telling. That said, the point of any music biopic is to investigate the artist further, attempting to make sense of the why and how they produced the art they did, but maybe this is precisely why Antoine Fuqua's Michael is more a concert than it is a contemplative or thoughtful piece of introspection. 

Michael Jackson was an enigma by intention (“I wanna be mysterious.”) yet this film does nothing (new) to uncover either what made him the way he was or why he chose to be that way. The movie is most brave when it dares to confront fans with the obvious that was never spoken of (the nose jobs, the physical fallout from the Pepsi commercial) and is at its best when Jaafar Jackson and Juliano Krue Valdi are performing from what is irrefutably one of the best catalogues in all of music, but even if the film only zeroed in on the how/why such a meek man like Michael made such aggressive and often times angry music, why his social to stage persona shifted so drastically, the result would be ten times more enlightening than the carousel of greatest hits we've both heard (re: his discography) or seen (re: The Jacksons: An American Dream) before. What makes Michael worth the time and effort though is that Michael Jackson is the template for how to perfectly balance quality and commerciality to the point even in its most shallow of re-creations the music and visuals never ring hollow.

SPLIT Review

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when a new M. Night Shyamalan film was an event in and of itself. In 2002, at the ripe old age of thirty-two, there might have been no more hotly anticipated film of the year than the director's fifth film, Signs, but what was only his third feature since defining himself as the auteur he seemed destined to be. Fifteen years later and we are in a very different time and space. After the success of Signs (over $400 million globally on a $72 million budget) the studio system continued to only throw more and more money at the writer/director and increasingly his films became examples of trying too hard to do what his first few features had seemingly done with such ease. After 2008's utterly confounding The Happening it seemed Shyamalan might have given up completely as he then resorted to being a director for hire on projects like The Last Airbender and After Earth, but even in these endeavors he experienced some of the more scathing reviews and certainly some of the worst box office returns of his career. Where was the director to go? What was there to do next that might reinvigorate his career? Did this once glorious storyteller that TIME magazine so famously labeled "The Next Spielberg" even care to continue to put forth effort and/or art into the world or was he done? In one way or another it feels like we haven't had the real Shyamalan with us for some time. That the person he was in his early thirties had been lost to the grueling system and there was no certainty as to whether he'd ever come back. In truth, Shyamalan hasn't taken a break longer than three years in between films since 1998 film Wide Awake and those three years came in between Airbender and After Earth. It was only two years after the nepotism on a spaceship tale that was Will Smith's After Earth that we caught a glimpse of who we thought Shyamalan was and might become again. I didn't write about The Visit, Shyamalan's 2015 feature that experimented with the found footage approach, but it was a deliciously pulpy little thriller that not only provided a signature Shyamalan twist that worked with the rest of the narrative, but melded the humor, the uncertainty, and the tension of the situation in ways that felt organic-as if the marriage of story and image were flowing out of the director like they hadn't in some time and this upward trend in quality only continues with Split. Like The Visit, Split is set in a single location and relays a rather simple story in both interesting and horrific ways. It is a portrait of a character and in being that it explores a subject with multiple personalities it might be something of a twisted self-portrait from a director who was labeled as one thing, attempted to remain that thing until he was told he wasn't good at that thing anymore and then tried something else only to fail thus forcing him to re-invent himself once more.

First Trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's SPLIT

Unfortunately, a new trailer for an M. Night Shyamalan movie doesn't carry as much excitement as most thought it might in the early years of the new millennium. Fortunately, Shyamalan seems to be finding his footing more recently as last years fairly underrated The Visit was a pleasant surprise from a director who'd taken a detour from what his predetermined course seemed to be. The Visit, which I didn't get the opportunity to review last year, was a clever little play on the handheld camera horror genre where it was still up to the characters to capture the necessary elements of the story, but at the same time retaining the elements and mystique of a classic Shyamalan script. That the writer/director has again come to operate in something of a larger genre while seemingly still applying his own twisted mentality to the situation is promising. As I watched the trailer I couldn't help but be reminded of this years 10 Cloverfield Lane, but with the added element of knowing what was wrong with our captor from the get-go rather than that mystery remaining the backbone of the movie. This hopefully indicates the film has more to it and can deliver in its third act. Besides the engaging premise that sees a man with twenty-three personalities living inside of him kidnapping three young girls and holding them hostage in his cellar the film looks to feature a show-stopping performance from James McAvoy. McAvoy, beyond his most prominent role as Charles Xavier in the new wave of X-Men films, is an interesting performer that chooses some diverse projects to participate in and it seems that the actor has found a formidable collaborator in Shyamalan who supports pushing the envelope. The film also stars The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy, The Edge of Seventeen's Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula as the three young girls McAvoy's Kevin kidnaps with Jason Blum again producing and the director teaming up with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (It Follows) for the first time. Split opens on January 20th, 2017.