The night of Friday, February 5th, 2016, I will not be going out to party, drink or watch basketball. I will come home from work, play with Nyles until he falls asleep, and then eat dinner with the wife. At the conclusion of this dinner, I will retrieve the fine bottle of wine that I will have purchased earlier in the day--most likely a Francis Coppola Diamond Black Claret 2013--and I will sit my ass down to watch Spike Lee's documentary on Michael Jackson.


Spike's first documentary on MJ focused solely on "Bad", and I have watched it at least 10 times since it came out back in 2012. I appreciated because Spike did more than just regurgitate the same MJ stories I had heard so much about up to that point. He interviewed dancers, engineers, Quincy Jones, Bruce Swedien, horn sections, video directors, background singers, Siedah Garrett, and he even used older interviews from Mr. Jackson himself. Spike took the attention away from MJ the freak show, and he placed it firmly on what should have always been emphasized, and that is the music and the dancing. If you have not seen that Bad 25 documentary, go to itunes, purchase it, carve out 2 hours of your time, and take it in (that's what he said).

This new documentary focuses on the period of time between the the Jackson 5 becoming the Jacksons and the completion of "Off The Wall". "Thriller" gets all the attention, "Bad" was the most difficult album to make ever because it followed "Thriller", "Dangerous" showed that MJ still had it even with Teddy Riley's attempts to sabotage MJ with synthesizers and synthetic sounding music and "Invincible" was just uninspired (but I still bought it, because I'm a fan). "Off The Wall" is probably MJ's best and most satisfying album, but most importantly, he announced to the world, "Baby I'm A Star" (see what I did there). I can't wait to see it, and the trailer is already dropping nuggets of information I previously did not know about: