Category Archives: Biography

Movie Review: Michael

Posted on by • Posted in Biography • Tagged • Leave a comment

There is a chance that during the 152-venue Taylor Swift tour, which ran from March 2023 to December 2024 in 51 cities and grossed over 2 billion dollars, that Swift might have surpassed the fame Michael Jackson had at his peak in 1984, but this is impossible to know for sure.

The difference between Taylor and Michael is that she was not burdened with an abusive father, and Swift was not ten years old, the lead singer of a huge music act, and the sole financial support of his whole family. There is no way that someone like Michael Jackson could have lived such an extremely unusual life, with so much red-hot worldwide fame, and still turned out to be a normal, well-adjusted person. Jackson’s huge talent was both a great blessing and a curse. The good news is that Taylor Swift is a normal, well-adjusted person and will not be following the path of Whitney Houston, Elvis, and Michael Jackson and so many others who could not adjust to the negative aspects of being so famous.

The new biopic “Michael” is about Michael Jackson’s career, which started with the Jackson Five, and the start of his solo career in 1978 with the album “Off the Wall,” and eventually led to “Thriller” in November 1982, the most popular album of all time, and unprecedented superstar fame. In January 1984, Jackson was filming a Pepsi commercial and promo for the Jackson family Victory tour, and he suffered a massive burn injury to the top of his head, which burned his scalp so severely he became addicted to painkillers for the rest of his life. Of all the bad breaks Jackson endured in his career, this one injury ranks as the worst because of the doctors who prescribed many years of opioids to help him with his burn injury and made him a drug addict.

Michael is directed by Antoine Fuqua and stars Jaafar Jackson as Michael, Colman Domingo as Joseph Jackson, Nia Long as Katherine Jackson, Juliano Valdi as young Michael Jackson, Larenz Tate as Berry Gordy, and Miles Teller as Jackson’s manager after he became a solo artist. The acting is very good throughout, with too many scenes of a belt and child abuse with Joseph Jackson and his ten-year-old son Michael, which were extremely difficult to see and hear.

Joseph’s lifelong attempt to dominate Michael’s entire career is a central part of this story, which, in the end, with the Jackson family Victory tour in mid-1984, Michael was finally able to escape. This movie abruptly ends in 1984, twenty-five years before Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009, almost as if the producers and screenwriters were afraid to go further into Jackson’s many allegations of child molestation, which were never addressed in this film. The best parts of the movie are the singing and dancing of Jaafar Jackson, who does an outstanding job with all of the most famous performances of Jackson’s career, and the movie ends with about 15 minutes of Jackson performing in the Victory tour.

This movie does a good job as a biography of one of the most well-known music careers of all time, but with no new revelations or addressing the many controversies that Jackson lived through. This is one of the main reasons for the surprisingly low critical Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 38%, with an almost perfect 97% audience rating. My rating is 85%, and a strong recommendation to see this movie for the great musical performances and acting.

Movie Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

Posted on by • Posted in Biography, Drama • Tagged , , • Leave a comment

Most fans of the great entertainer Bruce Springsteen will probably think that the new biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is about how someone born in Freehold, New Jersey, in September 1949, came from nowhere and became an international sensation. This movie would be about a sequential story spanning many years of squalor and hardship, including sleeping on couches, living in a car, and in bad hotel rooms, with no money, hunger, and desperation, and somehow never giving up the impossible dream of becoming a famous singer. This film would also be about his friends in “The E Street Band” and how their friendships grew, and how they all overcame so many years of bad times and then finally tremendous success.

Unfortunately, this movie is not about any of these things. The screenwriter/director, Scott Cooper, decided to make this entire movie about a small moment in time in Springsteen’s career after his album “The River” was released, when Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent time in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and records a new album on low-quality sound equipment and spends too much of the remaining movie brooding and depressed over releasing this new album “Nebraska” as he recorded it originally. This includes many disagreements with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and his off and on again relationship with a single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), which, due to his conflicts and depression he treats very badly in this film. Ongoing flashbacks with Springsteen and his abusive alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) are at times hard to watch, because his father turned his anger and rage over his horrible life and bad jobs out on his wife and son, a life reality familiar to too many of us.

Most impressive are the way too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White, who closely masters the sounds and single style of one of the greatest singers of all time. Anyone would have to admire the amount of hours of training and practice to master a voice as challenging as Springsteen’s.

Once again, in an effort to do something new and different, a great opportunity was lost with this movie because just about everybody would rather see a true biography and not a small, depressing excerpt of the career of Bruce Springsteen. This is the reason behind the low ratings of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, making a movie that should have been a huge hit, a big miss, for reasons that are so obvious. Overal I also rate this movie a pass, only recommending the scenes of some good acting and the too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White.

Movie Review: A Complete Unknown

Posted on by • Posted in Biography, Drama • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

The new movie “A Complete Unknown” is one of those high-quality end-of-year film releases where we know immediately that the main star, Timothée Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan, is a 100% shoo-in for an Academy Award nomination for best actor and most likely the movie will be nominated for best picture.

Anyone seeing this movie will appreciate the work and practice it must have taken for Chalamet to master Dylan’s voice, which arguably has an unusual, but not high-quality sound. The reason why Dylan was so significant is that he became relevant at the exact perfect time in the 1960s and is more well known for the lyrics of the songs he wrote rather than the quality sound of the music. In the 1960s Bob Dylan was known as the “The Voice of a Generation“.

The movie A Complete Unknown is a story told by showing different musical performances by Dylan, as he starts as a completely unknown singer, wandering the streets of New York City to a few years later one of the most famous people in the world. During his early years, Dylan cheated on two of his girlfriends at the same time, Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro, and Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning. The back and forth breakups and reconnecting with these two women is a big part of this story.

Chalamet also did a great job mastering Dylan’s tired, drunk-like way of talking, sometimes seeming like he is about to fall asleep or fall over while walking around or even standing up. There was no obvious showing of drug use or heavy drinking to explain Dylan’s tired-like and word-slurring demeanor, but the chain-smoking by Dylan and too many other performers was annoyingly too much.

This story demonstrates, like some recent Whitney Houston movies and documentaries, how difficult it is to gain the heights of worldwide fame and then have to deal with the many downsides that come with a huge spotlight that never ends. One of the better scenes was when an audience booed Dylan for singing songs that were different than what they expected, angering Dylan who never wanted anyone but himself dictating the direction of his singing career.

One of the subplots in this movie, I thought was completely unnecessary was the frequent visits that Dylan and Pete Seeger made to a mute and dying Woody Guthrie in a hospital. This part of the story should not have been such a large part of this film, especially since Woody Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy never says a word during all of the hospital scenes.

Actor Edward Norton plays singer/manager Pete Seeger and friend of Bob Dylan in a part that was relatively small, considering the importance of Seeger discovering Dylan in the early 1960s. There is a great deal of singing in this film, as the story is connected by several different Dylan and Dylan/Baez singing performances, with many of their most famous hits.

Overall the acting in his film is very good by all of the actors, with a strong possibility that Chalamet will win his first ever Academy Award for best actor.

Overall, I agree with the middle-of-the-road Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 79% for this movie and give it a solid recommendation.