Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has written a long and heartfelt review of Antoine Fuqua's Michael. He has said that the film dragged him back to the morning of June 25, 2009 and to a dingy Vijayawada video parlour in 1984, where 'Thriller' first hit him "like a punch in the gut."
While Bollywood figures like Farah Khan and Anupam Kher have showered praise on Michael, the new Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic of the King of Pop, the film has stirred a far more turbulent reaction from Ram Gopal Varma. In a long, unguarded Instagram post on Friday, the filmmaker opened with three jolting words "I HATE MICHAEL" before unspooling a deeply personal tribute that read more like a love letter than a takedown.
A grief that dates back to June 25, 2009
RGV wrote that watching the film transported him to the morning he woke up to "those terrible white letters against black: “Michael Jackson is dead” He recalled flipping channels in disbelief, certain it had to be a nightmare, until the news ticker forced the truth in.
The Vijayawada video parlour that changed him
From grief, the post pivots to origin story. In January 1984, an engineering college friend pulled him into a "dingy video parlour" in Vijayawada to watch ‘Thriller’. "It was not just a song or a dance. It was an invasion," he wrote, describing Jackson as gliding, exploding and floating "like a supernatural entity." Tracks like ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Bad’, he added, felt like "a brand-new testament," and Jackson's videos became an "unreachable benchmark" he and other directors kept circling back to.
Why the 'hate' is really love
RGV brushed aside the scandals that have long shadowed Jackson's legacy, calling them "background noise." The real betrayal, he clarified, was mortality itself: "I hate Michael Jackson for dying… He backstabbed me. He betrayed my fantasy." He signed off imagining the singer "moonwalking across galaxies."
Starring Jackson's nephew Jaafar Jackson, alongside Nia Long, Miles Teller, Mike Myers and Colman Domingo, Michael has pushed Billie Jean back to the top of the Billboard Global 200.
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