THIS IS IT!
By Richard Pyatt

He's still a thriller-Richard Corliss, TIME
..beautiful..dazzling..a tribute to the power of Jacksons' body and voice, Ann Powers, LOS ANGELES TIMES
..highly charged, personal and captivating..Bradley Jacobs, US WEEKLY
This is it is a movie to be savored... Jim Farber, New York Daily News
..raw and endearing..the music pours out of him like sunlight.. Owen Glieberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

And then we have this
"Amid a considerable amount of filler, we have the painful sight and sound of Jackson days before
his death of a drug overdose. He looks alarmingly frail, his impassive face appearing older than his 50 years.
His once glorious voice, reduced to a hoarse whisper - when he speaks, there are often subtitles - frequently
fails to hit notes, much less hold them.At first, it seems the voice has returned for an elaborate
re-staging of "Thriller" - and then it becomes clear he's lip-synching to a decades-old soundtrack"
Lou Lumenick is The Post's chief film critic."
Now how to account for these ferociously different viewpoints?
Well, did these critics (the word is used very, very loosely" watch the same film?
Were they asleep at the switch (the late great Clive Barnes was often dozing during attendance at plays)
Were they paid off?
Were they hopelessly living in the past?

Or is Lou Lumenick simply a genius or more simply an honest and insightful critic?

As we all may painfully conclude, the human individual is still an unfolding (or growing; or developing) creature.
He is not, by any manner of means, a finished product. He has come along the Path, into the "Hall of Initiation," through
aeons of trial and tribulation, on a wearisome journey which began with his first awakening. We could be philosophical
and make reference to the fact that so many of our ordinary tasks are performed automatically, or under
direction of the instinctive mind; subject only to a casual, or occasional, supervision of the intellect.
The instinctive mind is the "habit" mind: wherein, after having consciously performed some action several
times in the same way, the subconscious takes over and directs our actions without conscious attention.
When we have learned to perform tasks by rote, or, as we say, "by heart," we have mastered them on the
conscious plane, and then" passed them on" to the instinctive plane.

The man who drives his automobile; the man who operates a machine for producing some product;
the smoker who often lights a cigar or cigarette unthinkingly, to become suddenly aware that he is
holding it in his hand, and many other automatic actions which are performed without very
much conscious attention, finds himself unable to cope with all the affairs of one day, to say nothing
of being unequal to performing all the required tasks, if he had to be consciously alert to every action he performs.

And so the only answer I can come up with to account for these perverted judgements is that they are being written
By "rote", without conscious attention.

Now if we could only find a conscious critic who would honestly write that Bob Dylan is the like chalk scratching
on a blackboard and is painful if not damaging to the ear.