Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall

I've watched this about ten time, now. The Jackson Five was big when I was in high school and I loved the songs they did in the very early 70s. I love how this addresses how mature he was, as a child, and how he was so eager to learn and instinctively knew things that it took most adult artists years to learn. He was amazing, and in interviews, he always seemed so nice, and to enjoy what he was doing, immensely.

I love the fact that this documentary ends before what I think of as the artificial Michael Jackson started to come out. That part is so unspeakably sad that I can't stand to watch anything about it. I don't really think saying that is a spoiler, since the title says that it only goes through "Off the Wall".

If you believe everyone who does their piece to camera in this fawning adulatory documentary by Spike Lee, then "Off The Wall" is the greatest piece of music ever created in the history of western music. Well, sorry Spike, but, this just in, it isn't, at least not in my opinion. Jackson himself only wrote two and a half (one was a co-write) songs on the record and the rest are a mixture of Rod Temperton originals and errr... off the wall cover versions of songs of very varied quality, I mean Paul McCartney's saccharine "Girlfriend", Carole Bayer Sager's vacuous "It's The Falling In Love" and that god-awful ballad "She's Out Of My Life", by whoever wrote it, seriously, who even plays these tracks today.

The film purports to take us from Jackson's glory Motown days to the release of this supposedly epochal album, but ends up by giving us an extended track-by-track run-through of "Off The Wall" like an episode of "Classic Albums". I did enjoy seeing some unseen footage of various Jackson interviews but these are swamped by a host of uncritical, cringeworthy comments by a variety of participants, many of whom I either didn't know or whose relevance to MJ, I couldn't comprehend. Cobey Bryant, I understand, is a basketball player but not someone whose opinion on music I'd care to hear. For sheer sore-knees sycophancy however, someone called Rosie Perez certainly takes first prize. For some strange reason, David Byrne, ex of the new-wave band Talking Heads, gets to say a few rather distracted words along with archive interviews with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr and Gene Kelly. Yet nowhere are there interviews with the likes of Temperton, Quincy Jones (other than on archive), McCartney or even Diana Ross. It's all very odd and disjointed indeed.

The movie also glosses over the car-crash that was his acting debut "The Wiz" and also hasn't even got the guts to call out the duff note at the end of the afore-mentioned "She's Out Of My Life". It goes without saying too that there's no mention of his difficult relationship with his typically pushy show-biz father Joe, his own eccentric lifestyle, health problems or his future travails in the courtroom.

There's some exciting footage of a Jackson family concert circa 1981 showing him for the great performer he undoubtedly was but it's milked for song after song until its effect is diluted. But when I'm later told that a promo video of "Rock With You" is compelling viewing by the faithful admirers when all it is, is Michael miming in a spangly suit, then I guess I'm in the wrong crowd. And as for that awful rap performed again by someone I don't know over the end titles, the least said the better.

Listen, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson and when he was good he was utterly brilliant, as a singer, writer and performer. But really there's only one outstanding song on the "Off The Wall" album and that's his own "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" with maybe three goodish ones backing it up "Rock With You", Stevie Wonder's "I Can't Help It" and the title track. I would question the premise of the timeline represented by this documentary (the Motown years must be worth a film of their own, surely) and seriously question its complete lack of anything approaching critical analysis both of Michael Jackson and his music.

Oh and by the way, the Jacksons "Triumph" album, made just after this, to which he contributed far more musically, is much superior to "Off The Wall" and any other solo album MJ ever made. If this is the fuss Lee makes over the fair-to-middling "Off The Wall", I fear for the treatment "Thriller" will get, although I might laugh at the same superfans here admitting that it beats its unbeatable predecessor.

Meanwhile this massively biased feature is for devoted Jackson fans only.

I LOVED this documentary. The only con for me was i feel like they didn't talk about the Motown days enough, i wish they spent another 30 mins talking about it and showing more footage from the early 70s. I loved this documentary though and the clips they used were in great quality! I wish John Legend wasn't in it though, i cant stand him.

Michael Jackson was a rare thing, a child star who actually made it as an adult. He was also a complicated icon of black America, an individual whose sanity was sometimes questioned, and a businessman, very definitely promoting a product. Spike Lee's documentary focuses mainly on the first of these, charting his rise to fame. It's definietly an interesting story, but the overall tone is hagiographic, and the contrast between the young Jackson's astonishingly shy public persona and the confident performer is never completely explained: there are a lot of talking heads here, but none tell us anything that personal. Still, it left me wanting to know about the next phases of his life as well, the rise to megastardom and madness, and his unfortunately early death; and with a sense of recognition of his phenomenal talent, even though his music wasn't my personal taste.

When it comes to Spike Lee as a director of documentaries, he is practically untouchable. 4 Little Girls, the two Katrina documentaries and, if one counts it, his 'concert' movies of Original Kings of Comedy, Huey Newton, Passing Strange - the man is a master at getting people comfortable to open up on camera, and to just bring his skills as a storyteller to show why something is SO important. In lessor hands the story of how Michael Jackson made Off the Wall would be informative and probably interesting, up to a point, but perhaps it would get a little too technical and miss the emotion behind the songs (I'm reminded of the many Classic Album documentary episodes out there, like for Who's Next or Metallica's black album and so on and on). With Lee, he gives this story the fullest possible context in a full 110 minutes - how "MJ" (as he decided to call himself, by the way, before any fans) got to make this record, his first as a solo artist, is essential to discover.

It should be said that there are a lot of talking heads here, but what's commendable and great is that Lee doesn't just focus on musicians. There are plenty to go around here, from current people (Questlove gets a lot of time, and no wonder as he is a fantastic person to talk about this subject and album), to Stevie Wonder and Berry Gordy and on and on. But there's also Kobe Bryant, Rosie Perez, John Leguizamo, it's about the legacy on people from basketball players to professional dancers to everybody in-between. So while we get the people who talk up Jackson - and why not, it is Michael Jackson at THIS stage of his career, when he had everything to prove in and out of the Jacksons - the clips that Lee gets, from a Jackson 5 cartoon to behind the scenes footage on The Wiz and a blazing-on-all-cylinders concert with MJ and his brothers in 1981, make it an absolute delight.

A lot of the documentary is about process, and how Jackson was someone who in a way was like the Kubrick quote from Nicholson: everyone acknowledged he was the man, and it still underrated him. I almost kind of take him for granted, years after he's passed on and the world's been without a new Jackson record, and yet it's eye-opening when I'm thrown in once again to see what was great about him, as a dancer, as a laser-focused talent in the studio (i.e. perfectionist at most times), as a singer and most of all as a kind of absorber of all of the influences around him (that's the key thing really, that he came as fully formed after a lot of years of practice and going through ballads for rats and so on). This happened in 2009 with the sort of post- mortem doc/concert This Is It, and yet here it's much more illuminating on an entire decade of music and experiences. The sort of thesis of the whole thing becomes as like, Jackson HAD to do something like Off the Wall after going through the entire 70's as a performer and as a FAN of all that was around him.

In other words, the first half is the lead up, with many of the songs that you probably remember, or, perhaps, have possibly forgotten but immediately hear a track like 'Blame it on the Boogie', or even (ashamedly) thought Jackson did on his own and not with his brothers like 'Shake Your Body to the Ground,' and then the second half is a track-by-track breakdown of the album. While it may rush just slightly through the B-side tracks - albeit the highlight of the whole documentary may be a comparison of one particular song to Eddie Murphy's Delirious bit on MJ - it's still mostly comprehensive and engrossing as far as how Jackson, Quincy Jones and those involved (Stevie Wonder!) got to make the tracks to such an impressive point.

Whether you already love the album to death or only know big hits (there are at least four though), this really does make it into such a point that, yeah, go back to listen to the songs again, but like with Jackson in general you may have taken aspects of the songs for granted. Even something as seemingly simple and easy-to-digest like 'Rock With You' (one of the greatest tracks, for me, that he ever made) gets deeper with just the *sound* of it all.

It's an incredibly impressive documentary that will be like revisiting an old friend for the fans, and is THE thing to see if you want to know what else he did aside from Thriller and Bad (or think he was just some, you know, weirdo or something).