There was never a world in which a decades-spanning biopic of the King of Pop sanctioned by the Jackson clan was going to be anything other than hagiography, but the lack of any dramatic complexity is quite remarkable. There is the villainous father, the saintly mother, the brothers who might as well not even have names, and the haunting absence of Rebbie and Janet. And there is Michael. An unknowable enigma that the film doesn’t even try to render in anything but the most simple terms. Peter Pan is all we get, and the film assures us that’s all there is. Seeing Suzanne DePasse enter the story and almost immediately exit is bewildering (but not surprising in a film that cut out Diana Ross). So we get the generic Marvel movie of a music biopic with all the usual beats. Fuqua spends an inordinate amount of time recreating whole musical performances with Jaafar Jackson impressively mimicking his famous late uncle. One wishes they’d gone the Steve Jobs route and just told the whole film as a series of pivotal concert performances with backstage drama. They might as well have. They skip so many years and neglect so many relationships (only to spend so much time on MJ’s relationship with his attorney) that a more unconventional approach would have made the opaque relationships a feature rather than a bug. But none of that matters. The audience wants a nostalgia delivery system, and they got it. They are able to commune with a lost icon for two hours and the filmmakers know the public will be satisfied with that alone. But we could have had more.
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 (Raoul Peck, 2025): 3/5
Today’s empires, tomorrow's ashes. Nothing like a nice optimistic documentary about how everything George Orwell predicted is coming true.
Decision to Leave (Chan Wook Park, 2022): 4/5
This film has everything I love: Mahler, sushi, CPAP machines, and self-destructive romantic obsession. I’m not a big Chan Wook Park fan but this is my favorite feature of his so far. Park’s directing is fun and kinetic but perhaps it doesn’t work quite as well in the film’s second half when the story takes a few turns. Also, few filmmakers have loved anything as much as Park loves the turquoise-teal-cerulean spectrum of color.
I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026): 4/5
Some people watch movies and crave precision and economy. But I’ll take a chaotic joyride of a movie that bites off more than it can chew over a middlebrow Oscar bait fare any day of the week. And to think that the writer-director recently confessed in his Criterion Closet video that he does not know the films of Federico Fellini!!! Which means at this moment, Boots Riley might be watching Toby Dammit! Think of what could be in store for us then! Keke Palmer is a national treasure. Love her and the rest of the cast. Demi Moore is so good at playing a villain. Slow clap for the amazing costume designer Shirley Kurata and production designer Christopher Glass.
BOOK NOOK
Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
Just finished! (I'm a really slow reader by the way. The better the book, the slower I go. It's because I absorb. I marinate. ) What a tremendous voyage of a book, glorious, strange, a ship that should not be sea-worthy but that tossed and glided through. Some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. And different than I expected, more subtle in its story, especially toward the end. Not an easy book by any means. I tried three times before and never made it beyond a hundred pages. This read, however, was successful. Apparently, I was ready for the long journey.
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