Hey folks, just a quick note to let you know we’ll be liveblogging the American Music Awards this Sunday night (ABC, 8/7central — we’ll be here for the Pacific time zone broadcast) so please come by as we bow down to/bitch about who won what, who blew whom off the stage and who ripped off Lady Gaga’s look most blatantly. A few things we should all reasonably expect to see: MORE »
After last night’s ABC interview between Robin Roberts and Janet Jackson, much of the media focus, naturally, has been on comments the 43-year-old singer made about her brother Michael. (He was “in denial” about his dependence on drugs. She tried to intervene because “that’s what you do when you love someone.”)
But—oh, right—Janet is actually an artist herself, lest we forget in MJ-obsessed 2009. Below is one of the more interesting clips from the interview, where songwriter-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—who Janet refers to as “my two dads”—discuss the pop star’s “inner turmoil.” MORE »
Move over, Love: There might be a new Michael Jackson-themed Cirue Du Soleil show hitting Vegas. MORE »
Carrie Underwood’s aptly-titled Play On has landed at #1 on the new Billboard Top 200 Albums chart this week, after sales of roughly 318,000 copies. The “Country Casanova” singer now has the distinction of having the best opening sales week of 2009 by a female artist. But if those 318,00 folks who picked Play On just can’t get enough of the American Idol Season 4 champ, she’s set to co-host the Country Music Awards tonight with Brad Paisely. MORE »
In honor of Sesame Street’s 40th Anniversary today, here’s the smooth-jazziest rendition of the Sesame Street theme, as sung by Joshua Radin. Can’t you just imagine Oscar the Grouch wearing a beret sipping an espresso while listening to this play in a piano bar in the West Village? Or maybe that’s just us?
Take a jump to check out the PBS show’s top 5 pop-star appearances: MORE »
Last night in the UK, a televised attempt to contact the spirit of Michael Jackson was transmitted to TVs. And people actually watched it! Popjustice’s Peter Robinson called it “the worst thing I have ever seen… [yet] strangely arousing”; another blogger noted that whatever Jackson was saying wasn’t too important—the cosmos-crossing communication was stopped midway through one of his utterances “because Eddie Murphy and Beverly Hills Cop III is on at 11pm.” So was it totally useless? Well, not 100%! MORE »
So much for this being it: Tomorrow night, the British cable channel Sky 1 will broadcast a séance in which psychic Derek Acorah attempts to contact Michael Jackson from the great beyond. The interdimensional chat, which will apparently be held “on an island… in a secret location familiar to Jackson” for the purposes of extra paranormal gobbledygook clogging up the transmissions, will be broadcast live. Acorah is a TV pro, hosting TV shows and embarking on tours in the UK, so I’m sure that something will happen during the telecast even if nothing really does, you know? After the jump, the Vaseline-smeared promo for the telefestivities. MORE »
Michael Jackson’s posthumous concert-rehearsal documentary This Is It had an OK opening weekend here in the United States—it was the highest-grossing movie from Friday to Sunday, although the $21.3 million it pulled in was below expectations. (It’s raked in $32.5 million here since opening on Wednesday—way lower than the $250-million-in-five-days figure that concert promoter AEG Live had touted in the run-up to the movie.) Over the weekend, This Is It distributor Sony Pictures announced that it had decided to keep the movie in theaters for longer than its initial two-week run, spinning the move as such: MORE »
The eight bucks that I plunked down to catch Michael Jackson’s posthumous rehearsal flick This Is It at my local malltiplex yesterday? That was 0.000108% of the film’s first-day gross of $7.4 million. It’s expected to bring in $40 million through Sunday. [Billboard] MORE »
Michael Jackson’s This Is It opens with a slow burn, which is probably the way the man who the film was created in honor of would have wanted it; a scroll about the film’s origins that oddly glides over the manner of his untimely passing, the title card, and then a series of reactions from the show’s would-be dancers, all gathered to audition for the man who, to hear them tell it, inspired him to dance. When Michael does finally arrive on screen, then, the viewer has been prepared for his arrival—and yet, it’s still kind of incredible, to see this man who for so long had loomed as something larger than life, in part because he really wanted to, actually appear on screen in something resembling his element. MORE »
