This weekend I decided to do what most of the movie going population and went and watched what had to be the biggest cash grab that has been shown at my local theatre all year, This Is It. First let me say that even though I will say that this thing which they showed to me last night fails to count as a movie as far as I’m concerned it definitely did not entertain me and by far did not make me proud to be a MJ fan.  This show made me sad, as an MJ fan, because it became painfully obvious ten minutes in that this was going be a huge waste of my time because I was going to have to sit through two hours of him skipping lyrics and experimenting moves with the set up on stage because it wasn’t a concert, it was a rehearsal.  There is a reason people rehearse, it is to perfect the show before they make people pay their money to see it.  So why did Kenny Ortega, the ‘director‘, think that I needed to see this?  Maybe it was because he was taken from us too soon, maybe because he got tired of reading emails from bummed out fans who actually had tickets to see him perform in London, or maybe he just plain didn’t give a damn.  

This film shouldn’t have amounted to anymore than a 20 minute special-feature on the expected DVD release of the taped final concert that MJ would’ve given us had he not died.  This however just makes me mad as a fan of film and a fan of Michael Jackson’s music.  Yes I was happy to sit there and hear a few songs that I haven’t heard in ages being half sung by backup singers, but I definitely didn’t think it was worth paying to see.

I read that Kenny Ortega plans at least two hours of extra footage to be dumped on the DVD and that is complete lunacy.  I know the word is called fanatacism for a reason. Fans can’t be reasoned with, just ask any critic who decided to trash The Dark Knight last year, and so of course the DVD will sell like hot cakes with all of the thirty year olds foaming at the mouth for more.  Some of them probably hope that MJ took the Tupac route and recorded ten more albums worth of content so they can all come up with crazy conspiracy theories as to how he faked his death and what not.  But honestly I don’t care, just keep your crappy excuse of a movie away from my theatre and keep those in the STV isle of the video stores that I don’t go to.