GEORGE MICHAEL - A DIFFERENT STORY

Squeals and audible gasps erupted several times during the screening that I attended of George Michael - A Different Story. Squeals and laughter of delight whenever snippets of early Wham! and Faith-era footage splashed across the big screen, and a collective audible gasp when people realized that the tan, chrome-domed fellow wearing a suit was in fact (gasp!) Andrew Ridgeley! (Once you get over the fact that Andrew has resorted to shaving his head to hide his receding gray hairline—double-gasp!—you gotta admit he looks good.)

George Michael - A Different Story intersperses surprisingly revealing interviews with a relaxed and candid George with lots of performance footage and interviews with many relevant and irrelevent folks. Anecdotes with George's longtime best friend from grade school days, as well as Andrew Ridgeley, his former Wham! partner are the most fun. Plus there are other folks from the 80s era piping in, like backup singers Pepsi & Shirlie, Boy George (YESSSS!), and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet. Elton John, unsurprisingly, has a lot to say—both kind and a bit pointy—about his friend... but do we really care what Mariah Carey thinks about George, whom she obviously doesn't know?

The documentary has the most momentum in the first 2/3rds or so, going through Wham!'s very youthful success (George was doing all of the producing and arranging at the tender age of 20), George's uber-successful solo outing with his massively successful Faith album and tour, and his subsequent almost-meltdown. The most moving and revealing moment comes when George tells about his first love, a Brazilian man that he met at one of his shows, and stayed with for four years until he died of AIDS in 1993. George found himself giving a press interview in tears, offering quotes about Freddie Mercury's death from AIDS, when in fact he was a wreck because he had just found out about his lover's illness that day.

After that emotional peak in the film, the documentary slowly fizzles out. We hear about George's on and off productivity through the 90s, a bit about his fight against the Sony record label (which he took on with gusto to distract himself from his grief), some (funny) bits about his public toilet scandal, and his repeated comebacks. Maybe his anti-war song "Shoot the Dog" was super-controversial... in England. Truth was, I've never heard of it, or the scandal. In fact, the last chunk of the movie is basically an extended promo for his "new" (as of 2004) album Patience which, well, I had also never heard of, despite various folks in the film proclaiming it as "brilliant" and "his best work since Faith". Whatever.

Fans, I figure, will eat this up. But at the same token, I felt that the doc could have been better. Why, for instance, was the early music video footage so crappy? It looked like it was taken from someone's old VCR tape off MTV. And the digital video interviews with George himself aren't really in the most flattering light, unless he really is morphing into Andrea Bocelli. But make of it what you will... George Michael - A Different Story should definitely pique the interest of 80s music fans.