ONTD

Michael Jackson continues to be bigger dead than alive. It might have seemed that Kenny Ortega had his legacy covered with the 2009 documentary This Is It, but Spike Lee goes one better with Bad 25, an obsessively detailed quarter-century anniversary tribute to the 1987 album that capped the three-prong commercial tsunami Jackson began with Off the Wall and Thriller.

The film is a sensational snapshot of the peak of the music video as art form, as well as the intricately layered process by which superior pop is crafted. More poignantly, it serves to remove the veil of late-period craziness and allegations and restore the reputation of Jackson as a multihyphenate musician of peerless discipline, professionalism and perfectionism -- not to mention a pioneering influence in dance and fashion.

Following its Venice and Toronto bows, an edited version of Bad 25 is scheduled to air on ABC at Thanksgiving.

Lee directed Jackson’s 1996 music video for “They Don’t Care About Us.” Despite conducting the interviews personally, he keeps himself out of the picture here aside from one or two audio snippets. But it’s clear that his connection to this material runs deep, revealing itself, for example, in his exhaustive attention to the making of Martin Scorsese’s short film for the album’s title track. No less fascinating is his recap of the multiple choreographic influences that went into the video for “Smooth Criminal,” ranging from Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon to Soul Train to Bugs Bunny to Buster Keaton. The wealth of primo talking-heads fodder makes this of interest far beyond Jackson fans to anyone curious about the production and marketing of popular music.

The director’s appetite for trivia is contagious. Who remembered that one of Wesley Snipes' earliest roles was in the “Bad” video? Or that the arcane refrain “Shamone!” was Jackson’s homage to Mavis Staples? Or that the line “Annie, are you OK?” was inspired by the standard name given to CPR demonstration dummies?

It’s obvious that Lee is having as much fun as the audience sitting in with Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker as they look back over their work on the Bad short 25 years on. Writer Richard Price, who scripted the film for Scorsese, is -- forgive me -- priceless, discussing how an asthmatic Italian and an asthmatic Jew were enlisted by Jackson to make a video “to show the brothers that he’s down with them.” But Lee also gives serious consideration to the ways in which Jackson reaffirmed his connection to the black community.

Despite acknowledging the album’s flaws -- everyone, including Stevie Wonder, agrees that his duet with Jackson, “Just Good Friends,” was a dud -- the film is not guiltless of hagiography. But the fandom of interviewees including Mariah Carey, Justin Bieber, Cee Lo Green, Chris Brown and Sheryl Crow -- who performed as a big-haired backup singer on the Bad tour -- is generally disarming. (Perhaps the exception is Kanye West, who seems too self-regarding to really serve someone else’s tribute.)

Arguably, Lee’s one significant misstep is to lurch abruptly -- at the end of a meticulous track-by-track reconstruction of the album’s recording and the shooting of its many music videos -- to footage of Jermaine Jackson announcing his brother’s death. Lee then strings together a series of “Where were you when you heard he’d died?” responses, holding the camera on the subjects as they tear up. This feels manipulative and heavy-handed compared with the stimulating social context and illuminating insights that distinguish the doc and pinpoint it at a key moment in Jackson’s career.

But that’s just nitpicking. As forcibly inserted as they are, the memorials do serve to usher in a stirring assessment of “The Man in the Mirror” as a master class in how to build the perfect anthemic pop song. Input here comes from co-writers Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett, as well as producer Quincy Jones and choirmaster Andrae Crouch, among others. The knockout closing footage of Jackson performing the song in a 1988 Wembley Stadium concert, accompanied by 72,000 screaming fans, is the film’s emotional high point.

It’s to Lee’s credit that he doesn’t just go for the famous faces. Instead he digs into every aspect of the music by talking with engineers, arrangers, session musicians, vocal coaches, video actors, dancer-choreographers, recording industry execs, managers, lawyers, biographers and music journalists. Particularly humorous is plain-speaking Joe Pytka, who directed the “Dirty Diana” and “The Way You Make Me Feel” videos. But invaluable contributions come from a wide variety of sources.

The film doesn’t shy away from the negatives. It covers the inescapable hype that accompanied the album release, the “Wacko Jacko” stigma, the specter of racism, the animosity toward Jackson in some circles for his stratospheric success and the perceived encroachment on sacred terrain when he purchased the Beatles catalog. Significant time is spent on the goldfish-bowl vulnerability of being in the spotlight since childhood, reflected in the song “Leave Me Alone,” with its “Gulliver’s Travels”-style, tabloid-nightmare photo-animation video.

Mostly, however, Lee keeps the focus on the extraordinary professional achievement that the album still represents, capturing Jackson at the apex of his quest for full creative independence. Beyond its value as a deep-probe portrait of the artist, this is a superb account of the music business and an indispensable pop-cultural time capsule.

Source - The Hollywood Reporter

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“He’s got the perfect balance and soul and science,” producer Quincy Jones said of Michael Jackson, at the conclusion of their work on the album Bad (read TIME’s oral history: The Making of Bad). Spike Lee’s Bad 25, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week, exactly a quarter-century after its Aug. 31, 1987 release, shows the blend of inspiration and acuity that drove these two perfectionists in creating a worthy successor to their epochal 1982 album Thriller. Jackson said he meant bad “in all good will,” and in that sense the movie isn’t bad, it’s baaad — and great.

On mirrors wherever he went after Thriller, Jackson scrawled ”100,000,000″ — the estimated worldwide sales of Thriller; still the best-selling album of all time and the winner of a record eight Grammy awards. Bad topped out at about 45 million, but it was the first album in music history to birth five No. 1 singles. The Bad videos — or, as MJ insisted on calling them, “short films” — cemented Jackson’s stature as a movie star who never appeared in a hit movie; thematically adventurous and expertly choreographed, they provided the crucial link between golden-age Hollywood musicals and YouTube. To extend the album’s multimedia reach, Jackson toured for 16 months in 15 countries, 123 shows that displayed his preternatural showmanship and supernatural footwork.

Covering it all in a galloping 2hr.10min, Bad 25 is also a love letter from the often acerbic director, who at today’s press conference underlined the influence Jackson had on the aspirations of a black kid in Brooklyn. “I was born in 1957, he was born in ’58,” Lee said. “And when I saw the Jackson Five on The Ed Sullivan Show, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I had the Afro, the whole Jackson look. But the singing and dancing — that’s where it stopped!”

No matter: Lee, who directed Jackson in the 1996 video for “They Don’t Care About Us,” is a master of slick, sleek propulsion, as both interviewer and assembler of the all-time great making-of documentary. Like This Is It, the 2009 film of Jackson’s preparation for the concert tour aborted by his death at the age of 50, this is a demonstration of the backstage agony and artistry.

[...] “A lot of people misunderstand me,” Jackson once said. “That’s ’cause they don’t know me at all.” The singer revealed here is the obsessed professional who worked for months in Jones’s recording studio and at home with a “B team” of top musicians laying down demo tracks. He practiced his gliding, lurching dance steps with Soul Train graduate Jeffrey Daniel and A Chorus Line cast member Gregg Burge. He pored over the dance films of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse, writing in a note to himself, “Study the greats and become greater.” A record- and rule-breaker, Jackson also built on and improved on a century of American song and dance.

“I feel rejuvenated,” Michael Jackson said of his Bad album, “a jubilation.”

Bad 25 is an intimate view of a performer at his peak in the intense splendor of creativity. The movie ends with a magnificent rendition of “The Man in the Mirror” at Wembley Stadium in June 1988. Exhausted and exhausting, he gives his fans his unique all as singer, dancer, charismatic showman.

Source - Time Magazine

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Spike Lee's new film on Michael Jackson is a terrifically warm, affectionate and celebratory study of the late King of Pop's 1987 album Bad. Lee wants to clear away the tabloid smoke and spite, and bring the focus back to Jackson's professionalism, his craftsmanship, his artistry and his pop genius; the movie defiantly insists that Jackson was and is superior to his detractors.

Lee uses richly evocative clips and unseen archive material, including Jackson's stunning and mesmerically bizarre video demo of how he wanted the cartoon raisins representing him to behave for a TV ad. Lee doesn't try to pretend that he was not eccentric, but insists that Jackson's eccentricity isn't the point. He interviews the people who are influenced by Jackson now and those who were around him then – creatives, technicians, legal eagles – the massed Houston team that launched this heroic pop astronaut into space.

Lee begins by looking at Jackson's earlier album, Thriller, which established his extraordinary global dominance. Interestingly, Bad came along at a time when Jackson might have been beginning to feel his star was actually, if only by a millimetre, beginning to wane. Prince was the new pop sensation and hip-hop was emerging. Moreover, he felt criticised on the issue of African-American solidarity and also for having allegedly failed to exert enough raunchy heterosexiness.

Bad was going to change all that: a ferociously competitive counter-attack or rearguard action, the first album to be conceived on a stadium scale. He had in mind a bold new video, or "short film" as Jackson always high-mindedly called it, based on the true-life story of a black boy shot by a New York cop. Scorsese directed the film that showed Jackson as a shy student, confronting Wesley Snipes's tough guy, outfacing him with his dance moves and finally getting street respect: he's Bad. There is a very funny interview showing Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker watching the film now, with a touch of bemusement. Obviously, he isn't convincing as a warrior, but the point is that Michael Jackson, that delicate pop aesthete, alchemises his vulnerability and naivete into pure strength. And it works: he really is Bad.

His utterly distinctive dance style is related by Lee to a tradition encompassing Fred Astaire and Buster Keaton, and he makes a persuasive claim that he is a centrally important figure in that tradition. Unlike Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley, Jackson did not make conventional feature films, and so we don't have that as a visual resource, and of course the videos and live footage, startling and brilliant though they are, can't give us an extended view of what Jackson was like in ordinary, walking-and-talking real life. And his interviews were rare, and guarded.

Spike Lee's emphasises instead what Jackson's achieved in the public sphere: in music and in dance, and his exuberant reverence for the lonely King of Pop is contagious. It's impossible to watch this film without a great big smile on your face.

Source - The Guardian

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