Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us, he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker… we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…
Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…
The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.
“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…”
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
In 1988 Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker hit the theatres but unfortunately for MJ fans in the United States they missed out. With Michael Jackson financing what many claim to be a huge vanity project by himself he wanted too much money for the distribution rights and many US studios bulked at the price and it went straight to VHS the following year.
So what did the fans get? Well it’s a compilation of music videos from the past and four new ones from the Bad Album. Michael Jackson wanted to top the sales of the Thriller album and goes all out for promoting ‘Bad’. He went on an 18 month world tour and produced a film to coincide with it. The biggest selling point of Moonwalker was the short movie ‘ Smooth Criminal’. Directed by Colin Chilvers who became well known in the industry for his special effects work on the Superman films. Smooth Criminal has without doubt the best dance number ever staged and still holds up as the best music video produced. It’s a shame the short story for Smooth Criminal makes no sense and is just a bunch of ideas cobbled together from Michael Jackson’s crazy imagination… but it’s still pure eye candy none the less.
Oliver’s review:
Original trailer:
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
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