Who's seen it? I did today.

It was the.best.movie.ever. Michael was soooooo x1,000,000 ready to do the concerts. He was so funny too. He sounded like he did 25 years ago.

Review from nj.com :
The way he made us feel…

The smile you got when you heard that happy run down the keys that starts “I Want You Back.” The pull toward the dance floor that came with the chunky beat of “Billie Jean.” The grin that the blistering guitar break of “Beat It” always brought.

It’s been hard to remember that, lately.
Michael Jackson’s This Is It (PG) Sony (111 min.) Directed by Kenny Ortega. With Michael Jackson. Now playing in New Jersey. STEPHEN WHITTY'S RATING: THREE STARS

Rating note: The film contains sensual choreography

But “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” – as padded, stitched-together, and improbable a documentary as there ever was – still does something quite remarkable. It clears away the months of lawsuits and medical reports, the years of weirdness and scandal.

And, at least for a little while, it recalls those old joys by showing us Michael Jackson in the safest and most normal place he ever knew: On stage, in a spotlight, in front of an adoring crowd.

Instead of an audience, though, this time it’s a troupe of dancers, instrumentalists and backstage workers; these are the rehearsals for what was going to be a record-breaking string of concerts, a combination comeback/farewell tour at the age of 50.

It was a tour he never got to begin.

But he left behind tapes of run-throughs, tech rehearsals and full-on performances. And edited together (one song will often comprise footage from several different days), and bridged by interviews with the troupe (all flushed with enthusiasm, none knowing what was about to happen) it somehow became a movie.

A bittersweet memorial, too.

Some people will go to “This Is It” for other reasons, ghoulishly wondering if they can spot signs of Jackson’s decline. They will be disappointed. The man on screen here is as thin as a straight razor but just as serious, completely in charge and utterly focused.

While he may speak in a breathy Marilyn Monroe whisper, Jackson never leaves any doubt who’s really running things, giving explicit directions to dancers, pianists, even the show’s official director and “co-creator” Kenny Ortega. They are depending on light cues? No, please. They will depend on his signals, thank you.

There’s no sign of sickness here, no sense of an artist past his prime. Instead, you see a performer at his peak.

Jackson’s insistence on perfection made him leery of improvisation; the reason these different performances cut together is that Jackson made sure the performances never felt different. If you didn’t see the musicians in the background, playing, you’d think he was lip-synching to his old records.

But what records they were.

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A lot, of course, is missing (like the breakthrough solo hits on “Off the Wall” that pointed the way toward “Thriller”). Some songs are rushed, too (doing a half-hearted Jackson 5 medley – with back-up singers standing in for his brothers – he doesn’t bother with half the lyrics).

But “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is as fun and propulsive as ever, and “The Way You Make Me Feel” still has a lively, finger-snapping energy. And occasionally he actually gives himself (and the band) room to breathe, to find another note, to stretch a bit.

It at these moments – sans props, sans pyrotechnics – that the movie shines. Even four decades into his career, Jackson could still hit those falsetto “WHOO-hoo-oohs!”; even years after he’d last stepped on stage, he could still do a James Brown drop or snap into a Bob Fosse pose.

Unfortunately, there are only so many of these moments. A little too much of the movie is made up of backstage interviews, or special films shot for the tour – one a bathetic plea to save the rain forest, another a ludicrous “Smooth Criminal” mash-up that sticks a clown-faced Jackson in the midst of Bogart and Rita Hayworth.

Once we get back to Jackson, though – simply singing, smoothly moving – the film gets back on track. And for awhile – for a long while – it’s possible to concentrate on that, and not think about everything else.

Not think about the mad Neverland ranch, or the surgical masks, or the gimmicky marriages. Not think about the plastic surgeries, or the sex-abuse cases, or the operating-room-quality sedatives. Not think about any of it, until the end of the film, when a solitary Jackson sings a mournful “Man in the Mirror.”

And by then all you can wonder is, What was it that he saw, when he looked in that glass in the morning? And why, despite everything he had, did it never, ever match what he wanted to see?