Film: This Is It

There are several reasons why you might be planning to avoid the Michael Jackson movie, This Is It. The hype about advance ticket sales has been deafening, enhancing the suspicion that the project was cooked up by Jackson’s concert promoters as a catchpenny exercise to recoup their £25m investment in the aborted series of shows at the O2. The star’s death the day after a dress rehearsal is hardly reassuring either. What sort of shape was he in while the film – apparently culled from 100 hours of rehearsals in LA earlier this year - was being shot? You can almost hear the doctored vocal performances and see the body-double dancers at work. This Was Not It, you might well be thinking.

There are several reasons why you might be planning to avoid the Michael Jackson movie, This Is It. The hype about advance ticket sales has been deafening, enhancing the suspicion that the project was cooked up by Jackson’s concert promoters as a catchpenny exercise to recoup their £25m investment in the aborted series of shows at the O2. The star’s death the day after a dress rehearsal is hardly reassuring either. What sort of shape was he in while the film – apparently culled from 100 hours of rehearsals in LA earlier this year - was being shot? You can almost hear the doctored vocal performances and see the body-double dancers at work. This Was Not It, you might well be thinking.