I returned from the hol­i­days in Puerto Rico last night, and the free in-flight movie was the Michael Jack­son fea­ture This Is It. I was curi­ous about see­ing it when it came out, but didn’t get around to it. I really enjoyed it, for a whole num­ber of rea­sons. I’m not going to write a actual movie review, because I missed the first few min­utes and a air­plane isn’t a good place to watch a movie for that pur­pose. But I’ll go over the things that stuck out, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

1) There was absolutely noth­ing dark or macabre about it at all. If you didn’t know, you would assume he was still alive. No “Wednes­day, June 24th, 8pm” stuff. It was all time­less, date­less, and went between dif­fer­ent clips of the same song with no men­tion of time. It really comes off as a doc­u­men­tary of get­ting a major con­cert and stage show together, which is really fas­ci­nat­ing for a music junkie like me. I’ll con­fess a secret wish to some­day be involved with a huge, crazy rock stage show like that. I’m sure I’d won­der around too much and get set on fire by a flash­pot, James Het­field style, but still. I’ve seen a few huge rock shows in my time (Aero­smith, Rolling Stones, Paul McCart­ney) and always enjoy a good on-stage explosion.

2) Much was made about his phys­i­cal con­di­tion over the last ten years, so I was very curi­ous to see how well he was per­form­ing. And I’ll say this. He looked good! You need to remem­ber that the man was fifty years old. There’s tons of dance rehearsal footage, and he’s keep­ing up (eas­ily) with guys half his age. He’s obvi­ously going a lit­tle easy, but he’s hit­ting every move. And look­ing good doing it. His voice sounded very solid too. Maybe not quite what it was, but he repeat­edly said he was hold­ing back to save (and build up, I would think) his voice. But even at fifty per­cent, he was a incred­i­ble performer.

3) As a music nerd, watch­ing the process of get­ting the music together, along with the danc­ing and stage­craft, was really inter­est­ing. Let me say Michael really knew what he was talk­ing about. There’s a scene where he’s try­ing to explain a chord pro­gres­sion he wanted to the key­board player (on a super cool slow sim­mer ver­sion of “The way you make me feel”) and I’m prac­ti­cally shout­ing at the TV “Dude, just switch chords every mea­sure. It’s not that hard!” But in gen­eral, the band was pretty badass. There was a big seg­ment with 24 year old gui­tarist Ori­anthi Pana­garis and Jack­son trad­ing licks (gui­tar and vocal) that was really, really cool. I think any gui­tarist would be envi­ous of being in that position!

4) Thriller looked like it was going to be ridicu­lously cool. And watch­ing him do the now iconic thriller dance with the other dancers was really fun. He looked like he had a lit­tle smile on his face, kind of like “Yeah, been there on this one.”

5) The biggest thing that I noticed was how dif­fer­ent the per­sona of Michael Jack­son was dif­fer­ent than what the world was led to believe. He comes across as quiet, amaz­ingly polite, hard work­ing, and very much a per­fec­tion­ist. It seems like it almost pains him to say some­thing crit­i­cal to some­one. There’s a scene where he’s com­plain­ing about hav­ing trou­ble adjust­ing to his in-ear mon­i­tors (which I would guess he’s using for the first time) and he keeps apol­o­giz­ing for com­plain­ing. Not many big rock stars would be that polite in that sit­u­a­tion. He really seems pretty nor­mal to me.

6) After he died, a lot of peo­ple were very mean about him (Like Bill Maher, who is some­one I usu­ally like a great deal) and lost in the shuf­fle was what an extra­or­di­nary tal­ent the man was. Iconic singer and per­former to start. One of the great­est enter­tain­ers of all time. And one thing peo­ple don’t real­ize is that he was also a very very good song­writer. He wrote a good amount of his own mate­r­ial. He had 9 num­ber one hits that he wrote or co-wrote (includ­ing Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough, Billy Jean, Beat It, We Are the World, The Way You Make Me Feel, and Black or White) and 21 top tens. That’s a pretty good record, don’t you think? He was inducted into the Songwriter’s hall of fame in 2002. You can read more about his song­writ­ing accom­plish­ments here. He also did a lot of his own Choreography.

7) I guess to sum up, there’s really no rea­son Michael Jack­son should be at all nor­mal. He’s been a “Can’t leave my house” celebrity since the age of ten. He had a hor­ri­ble and vio­lent father (Seri­ously, the man’s a mon­ster) and had health issues his whole life. Just read a lit­tle bit about the inci­dent with his hair catch­ing on fire. It’s hor­rific. Of course he’d be a lit­tle strange. Check out how most child stars turn out. I think he did fine. It’s a shame that he didn’t really get the recog­ni­tion he deserved in life.