Gonna Hurt Your Mind

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A pair of musical biopics.

MICHAEL (2026)

A lot has been said about behind-the-scenes issues during the making of the Michael Jackson biopic Michael. At one point, the film covered Jackson’s life from childhood through sometime in the 1990s, until a clause was discovered in a legal settlement and any references to the 1993 sexual abuse allegations had to be removed. The entire third act had to be reworked, there were some expensive reshoots, and there have been rumors that director Antoine Fuqua was not involved for the entire process. There have also been a lot of negative reviews, describing the film as style over substance and an overly sanitized version of Jackson’s life. Those criticisms aren’t without merit – but neither is the final cut of the film. As the blockbuster box office shows, what Fuqua, writer John Logan, and whoever was making calls behind the scenes managed to bring into the world is a true crowd pleaser.

The film begins in the ‘60s, when Indiana steel worker Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo) assembled five of his children into a musical group known as the Jackson 5, with young Michael on lead vocals. And since Michael is in the lead, Joseph is particularly rough on him, causing them to have a very rough and toxic relationship. The Jackson 5 have great success through the end of the ‘60s and across the ‘70s – but when an adult Michael decides to try building a solo career as the ‘70s come to an end, it causes all sorts of trouble between him and Joseph.

For me, the most entertaining stretch of the film came when the story reaches the ‘80s and we get to watch Michael create the video for “Beat It,” build his album Thriller, work (in a brief glimpse) on that iconic video for “Thriller,” dazzle the world with the first demonstration of the moon walk, and get MTV to play his videos. While Michael’s solo work gets increasingly popular, Joseph manipulates that to his own advantage by locking him into Jackson 5 tours instead of solo tours. Victory comes in the final moments, when Michael finally announces that he’s leaving Jackson 5 and getting out from under Joseph’s thumb for good. So even though the ‘80s haven’t come to an end by the time the movie ends and there’s a lot of Michael Jackson’s story left to tell, the film feels like a satisfying viewing experience because it, in its final form, is all about Michael’s struggle to get away from Joseph. And in the end, he wins.

There’s no doubt that we’re going to get at least one sequel, but it’s difficult to imagine any follow-ups being as much fun as this movie is. Michael covers some major ups and downs in Jackson’s life – the Joseph conflict, the burns Jackson suffered while filming a Pepsi commercial – but nothing to the degree of what was ahead. There were some serious, dark allegations made against Jackson in the ‘90s and ‘00s, his life got increasingly bizarre, and then he died of an overdose in 2009, at the age of 50. Michael is about triumph. Once you go farther than this movie does, it will be hard for a movie not to be a bummer.

But that’s a problem for the filmmakers to figure out. Right now, we have a Michael Jackson movie that’s, for the most part, a blast to watch. It’s no wonder than the box office numbers are so high, because this is the sort of movie that will be very easy for a lot of people to watch over and over again. I’m not even a Jackson super-fan, but I’m eager to watch the movie again just one week after my first viewing.

The actor who took on the daunting task of playing Michael Jackson was the singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson, who I thought did an absolutely incredible job. You’d think it would be impossible for someone to be able to believably play Michael Jackson, but Jaafar did it. He pulled it off. I think it would be very cool to see him receive an Oscar nomination for playing his own uncle, and he deserves it.

WHITNEY HOUSTON: I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY (2022)

If you prefer the warts-and-all approach to musical biopics, you can turn to director Kasi Lemmons’ account of the life of Whitney Houston, which tracks the iconic singer from her beginnings as a singer in a church choir (overseen by her professional singer mother, Cissy), through her rise to becoming one of the most awarded performers of all time, to her drug-related bathtub drowning death at the age of 48 in 2012.

Scripted by Anthony McCarten, the film is completely respectful to Houston and will have viewers rooting for her, but it also doesn’t shy away from the fact that she had a very troubled life. Much like Joseph Jackson’s view of Michael Jackson, her father saw her as a walking ATM machine, which led to some financial issues. She had a rocky relationship with singer Bobby Brown, a man the world pretty much unanimously agreed didn’t deserve her. And she had drug problems that ultimately resulted in her death. That’s all in the movie, which also very openly confirms that the rumors of her being in a lesbian relationship with her best friend / assistant Robyn were true.

While we see the ups and downs of her personal life, we also see her enjoying great success with songs like “The Greatest Love of All,” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” “I Have Nothing,” and “I Will Always Love You,” we see her sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, and we see her take an acting role in The Bodyguard.

Naomi Ackie turned in a great performance as Whitney Houston – a performance that I would have also said deserved an Oscar nomination. Houston was a complicated person, but this film makes sure we can understand and care about her, and her story ends up being a tragedy.