This Is It : Movie Review


In the days and weeks after Michael Jackson's death last June, I was less surprised by the extensive public outpouring of grief over this sudden and painful pop-culture loss than I was by the surly presence of those who carped that the response was just "too much." The latter group seemed to consist largely but not exclusively of past-middle-aged white guys dressed in figurative, if not literal, Buffalo Springfield T-shirts. Jackson wasn't that great, or that important, they grumbled. Other camps also derided what they saw as the media's Jackson grief overkill, holding his death (an apple) up against, say, the war in Afghanistan (an obvious orange), before launching into a screed along the lines of "If the media spent even one-quarter as much time focusing on the important stories ..."

See www.salon.com for full review

Author : Stephanie Zacharek