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Michael Review: Bad

Pitchfork·Paul A. Thompson·about 1 month ago
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#pitchfork#michael#jackson#film#valdi#gordy
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It’s rare—and in micromanaged blockbusters, often impossible—for an actor’s performance to be so good it not only enhances the movie, but inverts the script’s intended meaning. Twelve-year-old Juliano Krue Valdi, who stars as young Michael Jackson in the first act of Antoine Fuqua’s grotesque biopic, does precisely that. Michael opens in Gary, Indiana, where Joe Jackson (an exhausting Colman Domingo) lords over his wife, Katherine (Nia Long), and the handful of his ten children for whom this film’s producers could secure the life rights. Joseph has a cruel and domineering air about him. He drags Michael, Tito, Jackie, Marlon, and Jermaine to nightclubs and talent shows, and when they return to the little house on Jackson St., they are belittled and forced to rehearse until they erase that night’s mistakes. For the rest of the film, it’s taken for granted that Michael wanted to become a star—that his father’s abuse was, if not a necessary evil, something he endured en route to what was always inevitable.…

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