Friday 8 May 2026
Off to the flicks I go for my May movie! Hoping for a bit of a ‘Thriller‘ of an evening this time with the Michael Jackson movie, imaginatively entitled ‘Michael’
And I do enjoy it!
My popcorn-pal on this occasion is an old pal from school. We’ve not met up for over a year but, as we rendezvous, are both thoroughly in the mood for a musical trip down memory lane. A chance to be transported back to the youthful times that bond us and to relive the excitement that the Jackson explosion caused in the first half of the eighties.
And the movie delivers this. The best part for me, is the re-tell of the making of the ‘Thriller’ album. The track list is unbelievable. To name just a few: Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’; The Girl Is Mine (with Paul McCartney); Thriller, Beat It; Billie Jean and P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing). And as they are reeled off and performed in the film, it is jaw dropping. I guess, it remains the best selling album of all time for a reason!
And then there is the Thriller video! Well, those of you too young to have been around at the time, we literally stayed up all night to see it first hit British TV, such was the electricity that surrounded Jackson’s early creativity, as the standards for videos and promotional strategies were rewritten. What I was not aware of, as a high school pupil in the 1980s, was that the album broke racial barriers in the USA with Jackson as the first black American artists allowed to appear on MTV performing ‘Billie Jean‘
Critics of the film are correct when they decry the superficial treatment of the many well know complexities of Michal Jackson’s life. But maybe this was not what the film makers intended to do. Maybe in this movie they, like us, simply wanted to celebrate the music and the magic it brought to that early eighties era, as opposed to an in-depth exploration of the sometime darker side of the man behind it.
Maybe such controversies are waiting for a sequel; this movie ends with the artist walking out on stage at Wembley in 1988 at the start of the ‘Bad’ tour and as the music finally fades the screen reads
The story continues…
But that is for another day. My friend and I head out into the night humming songs we ‘ve not hummed for several decades and have a wonderful evening with food and beer, indulging in reminiscence about past larks, loves and lives from age when we were still teenagers with the wonderful roller coaster of life very much ahead of us …
Smashing Single Parenthood 