Pop music is at once ubiquitous and unknowable. Almost everyone knows what it sounds like, at least for some period of their lives, and the really successful stuff, like certain one-hit novelties or any number of canonical Michael Jackson songs, lives on far beyond its initial era. Yet that kind of vast and echoing success is by its nature mysterious and rarified; there\u2019s a reason its conduits are often compared to magic. Magicians are tricky to depict in cinema because the live mix of credulousness and disbelief is so easy to get wrong or slickly fake with visual effects. Pop music, whether shown through real artists or fictional ones, is similarly fraught. Specifically, it often feels phony as hell.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes, there are the more obvious stumbling blocks like a star imperfectly impersonating another star, or, in the cases of fictionalized pop, the creation of idols that are hard to picture making it in the real world. But there are also visual and thematic cues that strike such consistently false notes that sometimes it feels like the knowing unreality of something like Josie And The Pussycats<\/a>, where comic book characters experience overnight success based on record-company machinations and subliminal messaging, is the only viable option. We\u2019re forced to confront the phoniness of pop on film again with the release of Antoine Fuqua\u2019s Michael, a new and much-discussed biopic<\/a> (in part, anyway) of Michael Jackson, one of the biggest pop stars the world has ever seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n For the moment, let\u2019s set aside the sins of omission<\/a> in Michael\u2018s time frame. What\u2019s truly striking about Michael is how flimsy the movie is on its own terms of spectacle-driven idolatry. Some of the movie\u2019s phoniness has to do with run-of-the-mill terrible storytelling, or lack thereof. There\u2019s a pervasive vagueness about what, precisely, Jackson\u2019s sensibility or point of view as a solo artist is, even as those around him insist that he has \u201csomething to say.\u201d The screenplay by the once-dependable John Logan features a truly astounding number of similarly perfunctory lines and exchanges; not a single conversation in Michael sounds like two humans talking to each other; instead, they tend to softly exchange bits of background information in oddly narcotized tones.<\/p>\n These are all damaging. Where the movie actually falls down, though, is what will inevitably be characterized as its saving grace: the scenes featuring Jackson\u2019s music, particularly several where songs are performed nearly in full. Or lip-synced, anyway; Jackson\u2019s real-life nephew Jafaar may have the moves down as Uncle Michael, but he hasn\u2019t been entrusted to sing the songs himself, so we get a peculiar (if relatively common) tribute-act effect where the audience is expected to believe they\u2019re watching some uncanny channeling rather than an embodiment less risky than karaoke.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s only the beginning of the disconnect on display in the film\u2019s performance scenes. Fuqua began his film career as a slick stylist with a background in 1990s music videos; early Fuqua movies like The Replacement Killers and Bait may be junk, but they\u2019re sleek-looking junk that resemble music videos far more than anything depicted in Michael. There\u2019s one potentially interesting scene in the movie where Jackson shoots the \u201cBeat It\u201d music video with real gang members, teaching them the choreography as he goes; Fuqua shoots it with a straightforward roteness that drains the song of its electricity.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s true of the live concert scenes, too; the camera doesn\u2019t ever appear anywhere that would be out of place in a genuine television broadcast, yet because Fuqua isn\u2019t really shooting a genuine live performance, there\u2019s a neither-here-nor-there quality. He never ascends into Baz Luhrmann-style delirium, but he doesn\u2019t capture anything resembling the fullness of a roof-rocking arena show, either. The crowd shots look canned and over-posed, and while Jafaar Jackson himself is an impressive dancer, he never seems particularly in sync with what the camera is doing. There are only glimmers of the pop ecstasy Jackson was supposed to inspire on his best days.<\/p>\n As a result, almost every scene in the movie feels ineffably off, even when Fuqua is trying to do something as simple as let the audience get lost in some of the most beloved pop songs ever made. Those music scenes may not even read as unrealistic, per se. Though they\u2019re doing a poor imitation of live television performance and\/or music video, those forms are how the world came to know Jackson as a solo artist. Not everyone minds when biopics depart from reality\u2014some audiences seem to actively prefer it, and it\u2019s really no different from a tolerance of clich\u00e9s from other genres. These movies have their own conventions, and though there are a few moments where, say, Bohemian Rhapsody makes a decent attempt to explain the unlikely artistic chemistry between Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen, it\u2019s difficult to capture the art of creation. The refraction of that creativity tends to play better; some of the best pop-music movies are actually about fandom, whether that manifests as Almost Famous-style mooniness or High Fidelity-style gatekeeping. These movies talk pop music in ways that should be embarrassing, but actually feel more lyrical than what most musical biopics can manage.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mother Mary, David Lowery\u2019s film<\/a> that\u2019s expanding into wider release as Michael invades multiplexes, is not a musical biopic, nor is it quite at the level of a great movie about pop music. Superficially, it\u2019s a great example of the other side of cinematic pop failure, where making up a fictional music star who supposedly holds audiences in her thrall can be a tricky pastiche game. Lowery has said that Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway), the pop singer at the center of his film, was partially inspired by<\/a> Taylor Swift and her Reputation concert film, though Swift\u2019s propensity for genre-hopping doesn\u2019t seem likely to jump into Lady Gaga-level costuming and quasi-religious imagery any time soon.\u00a0<\/p>\n For that matter, Mother Mary herself, despite an abiding love of headdresses, comes across as more serious-minded and thematically sober than either Gaga or Charli xcx, the latter of whom co-wrote some of Mary\u2019s songs. She\u2019s not even much like the real Mother Mary, an art-pop group that uses similar imagery and has joked about the movie\u2019s similarities to them on Instagram (though, again, it\u2019s hard to imagine Lowery actually took much from them besides some Madonna-style religious imagery). At times, her half-mournful, half-hypnotic electronic anthems sound a bit like British pop act Self Esteem\u2014though it\u2019s really the cadence of narration from Sam (Michaela Coel), Mary\u2019s former designer and confidante, that sounds like it could serve as a temp track for a sequel to Self Esteem\u2019s \u201cI Do This All The Time.\u201d Both leads have a morose grandiosity underlining how difficult it can be to imagine a new pop star from scratch\u2014and how imagining one based on existing trends may be even harder.<\/p>\n Mother Mary, then, does not particularly traffic in realistic human interaction any more than Michael does. It starts out like a stage play, with Mary turning up unannounced to Sam\u2019s estate after years apart, begging her to design a last-minute dress for her upcoming comeback concert. The movie itself also has passages the resemble a concert\u2014it has nearly as much performance footage as Michael, for a fabricated pop star who\u2019s never quite convincing as a global sensation\u2014and then becomes a sort of spooky music video as Mary and Sam re-bond (sort of) over a mutual haunting (sort of) and attempt a form of exorcism. I\u2019ve seen the movie twice and I don\u2019t feel entirely comfortable explaining what happens in it, even though everything depicted on screen is relatively straightforward.\u00a0<\/p>\n