2:46:37 PM Will Edmondson: So, thanks to some careful finagling and a super secret movie theater location, we were able to escape the hoarde of Michael Jackson fans and properly enjoy "This Is It" last night.
2:47:48 PM Tara Ariano: Ssssh, don't give away our pro-tips! But yes, other than one slightly too enthusiastic patron directly behind us, our screening of "This Is It" was dead silent and very pleasant.
2:48:49 PM Will Edmondson: Oh -- well, yes. But I meant that I was allowed to wear my rhinestone glove and bright red leather jacket and be accompanied by my pet chimp, Tara. I am a Michael Jackson FAN!
2:49:08 PM Tara Ariano: Wait. Your pet chimp is also named Tara? I thought you were talking to me!
2:49:43 PM Will Edmondson: Quiet, human Tara. Chimp Tara is teaching me how to play "PYT" on the spoons.

2:51:05 PM Tara Ariano: Anyway: the movie was not really what I expected. Knowing it was assembled from rehearsal footage, I thought it would be much rougher, with stops and starts and surveillance-style angles. But it actually gave a pretty good impression of what the real shows would have been like.
2:51:55 PM Will Edmondson: It would have been one hell of a show.
2:52:32 PM Tara Ariano: You kind of forget how many great songs he wrote. And some of them -- like the aforementioned "PYT" -- didn't even make the cut!
2:54:33 PM Will Edmondson: Right. What got me was that I'm too young to remember Michael Jackson as anything but a weird dude who got in trouble for doing bad stuff with kids.
2:55:17 PM Tara Ariano: I'm practically too young for that. By the time I was of album-buying age, he was in the "Black or White" phase of his career where no one cared so much about the music anymore.
2:55:19 PM Will Edmondson: I've seen his music videos, of course, but his Howard Hughes period was not what the movie showed. You kind of forget that the guy was an actual performer, and to see him actually sing and dance was really, really impressive.
2:57:02 PM Tara Ariano: Absolutely. I mean, I don't really need to see him sing a love ballad with overly-literal hand movements -- dude, it's not the hula -- but "The Way You Make Me Feel" and "Smooth Criminal" are two of my favorite tracks of his, and the production on both of those was pretty spectacular.

3:00:08 PM Will Edmondson: Oh I don't know. I don't pretend to understand dancing, dancers, dancing culture, or anything to do with non-athletic movement, so I can't pass judgement on the hand motions. But this movie was really good at one thing, for better or worse, and that's that it painted Michael Jackson as a really sympathetic figure. It showed a guy who was absolutely incredible at one thing, and only one thing, and when he strayed from it, or got out of his comfort zone, you saw how fragile and hopeless he was. As I said last night, it's hard to imagine Michael Jackson ordering a pizza or paying his electric bill.
3:04:29 PM Tara Ariano: I agree with you, but what struck me about his portrayal in the movie is that it seemed studiously to avoid any aspect of his personality -- or life, really -- outside of the performance. What you see in "This Is It" is an actual, no-hyperbole genius, creating a show and totally in control of the entire process. We don't see or hear about his kids or his home life or his legal troubles at all; we just see him working.
3:07:01 PM Will Edmondson: Right -- which, again, I had never seen before. It's easy to write him off as a nut who's kind of overrated and eccentric and insane when you see him wearing slippers to court. It's another to see him keeping up with dancers in their mid-20s while singing on-key and ordering the bass player around.
3:07:52 PM Tara Ariano: Yeah. It's kind of too bad he ever had to do anything offstage, since as you say, he was completely in his element as long as he was on it.
3:11:17 PM Will Edmondson: I was thinking about that too in the movie. Like, you think about all these other eccentric geniuses, like Albert Einstein or Howard Hughes, whose weaknesses were never thrust into the spotlight in their own time, but then "The Aviator" comes out and you see Hughes lining his home theater with urine-filled milk bottles. It's interesting to see how the 24-hour coverage of a guy like Jackson kind of sends him further down the spiral. Of course, he sought out the spotlight, it wasn't forced on him, and he's largely a product of the times. But you wonder what would happen if TMZ caught Einstein in his laboratory being a nutcase.
3:13:22 PM Tara Ariano: Well, and I think the real marvel of "This Is It" is that even given how much we know (or was alleged) about Jackson's personal life, the movie shows how good he was as an artist that, for those two hours, you really do forget about the other stuff.

3:15:25 PM Will Edmondson: Oh, totally. And also that it didn't seem morbid at all, until maybe the end. I was worried that this was going to be kind of sad, seeing a guy laced on painkillers, incapacitated, subdued, sort of clinging to stuff he did in the mid-'80s. but that wasn't the case at all; he was surprisingly energetic and youthful.
3:16:19 PM Tara Ariano: Yes. So then it was sad. But: good movie.
3:17:02 PM Will Edmondson: The whole thing was incredibly sad. The dude lived a tortured life, it seems, for reasons both thrust upon him and of his own doing. But I agree, it was a great movie.
3:17:22 PM Tara Ariano: I suspect we won't be so pleased by what we have to see next week.
3:17:27 PM Will Edmondson: What's next week?

3:17:55 PM Tara Ariano: Opening on 3,500 screens: "A Christmas Carol." Which, never mind the voice talent or the creepy stop-motion animation: IT'S THE FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER. Too soon for a Christmas movie!
3:19:19 PM Will Edmondson: But Tara, this movie will be in Disney 3D!
3:19:35 PM Tara Ariano: Seeing those dead eyes in 3D will be even creepier!
3:19:55 PM Will Edmondson: No, not you. I was talking to the Chimp. She's voicing her displeasure by throwing her poo at a picture of Jim Carrey.