It’s safe to say that Michael Jackson’s This Is It fulfills multiple functions. It permits fans (as well as the merely curious) to bid farewell to Mister Never Can Say Goodbye. It will almost certainly defray the losses of the promoters who lost a bundle on Jackson’s last concert tour that never happened because of his untimely death (not to mention bring a few million simoleans to the Jackson estate). Most of all it gives us a peep into the creative process of the prince of pop.

Director/choreographer Kenny Ortega makes a virtue of the unfinished. From over 100 hours of rehearsal footage he edited the passages so that they play as an unfinished symphony to an unfinished life.

I enjoyed this rough work-in-progress more than I would have the polished show, for the ragged process tells us more about the perfectionist Jackson and his relations with his singers and dancers than the razzle-dazzle of the concert, which would have been spangly and clockwork in its pageantry.

Do we learn anything about Jackson in the process? A little. That when giving direction to his musicians and dancers, he favors cooking metaphors like "simmer" and "sizzle." That he defied his Skeletor presence with hoofer’s gusto. That he husbanded his voice, letting rip only on "Human Nature" and "Beat it." That even in rehearsals, he carefully dressed, coiffed and made-up as for cameras. (He commissioned videographers to tape the rehearsals as reference material for future work.)

For those of who witnessed Jackson on screen, stage and tabloid over 40 of his 50 years, Kenny Ortega’s tribute is so concentrated on the performer that there is little time to think about the three-ring circus of Jackson’s life. (OK, once I gasped when I saw his Barbie-doll nose swimming in the face reconstructed to resemble that of Elizabeth Taylor. It was like seeing a Roman statue with the nose broken off.)

Walking out of the theater I felt the contradictory satisfactions that a) Michael Jackson  was still alive and that B) he died doing what he loved most.

The undersung Kenny Ortega, the guy who choreographed Dirty Dancing, who directed High School Musical and directed productions for the likes of Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers, did a masterful job. I gasped a second time at the realization that he lost both Swayze and Jackson this year.

The film’s funniest moment comes when Ortega affectionately mimics one of Jackson’s grand semaphores, causing the performer to giggle, "I love the way stewardesses do that."

Are you in a Jackson hole or will you see this? Favorite concert film?

The "Freaks" of Tod Browning's 1932 film made "normals" look aberrant.

What makes your skin crawl? Ghosts? Monsters? Bio-horror?

What unnerves you? Terror without a face? That figure in the shadows? Gore?

No sooner did my colleague, John, and I debate nominations for scariest movie ever than totalscifionline.com e-mailed its slate of The Hundred Greatest Horror Movies. I'll let you guess what tops the list. But while I find said movie completely creepifying, it doesn't give me the shivers the way that Freaks (1932) -- cast with real-life sideshow grotesques who take revenge on a devious "normal," Olga Baclanova -- or Psycho (1960), where the horror is less in what is shown and more in what you imagine in your head.

Horror should be heard but not seen. I realize this is counterintuitive -- especially for the fans of modern torture horror, or "gorno," flicks, as the wags call gore that verges on the pornographic.  The more the viewer has to infer from what is suggested, the more the movie worms its way into said viewer's nervous system and psyche. For this reason I've always been more vulnerable to the implicit horror in the 1940s movies from producer Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Seventh Victim) and the hints of horror in Steven Spielberg's Jaws than I am to the explicit horror of The Exorcist and Hostel. Of the more recent terrormeisters, no one creeps me out as thoroughly as David Cronenberg, the implications of whose bio-terror flicks such as Rabid, They Came from Within and The Fly give me night terrors. For me, the threat of the monster or violence is much more unsettling than its results.

So, what scares you? Why? Your nomination for scariest movie?

Amelia Earhart and Hilary Swank

Amelia Earhart (1897--1937), the aviatrix who broke records and hearts, had  an aerodynamic "shingle" bob and a streamlined figure. She was built for the speed, altitude and endurance records she set. Given her celebrity during her lifetime and her influence on the pilots, male and female, who flew in her slipstream, it's curious that her first fullscale big-screen biography is Mira Nair's barnstormer  Amelia (opening October 23), starring a weedy Hilary Swank. (Pictured, right, next to the real-life Earhart.) Maybe this is Earhart 's renaissance year, as she also figured (played by Amy Adams) in A Night at the Museum 2: The Battle for the Smithsonian earlier in 2009.

Though Earhart was the subject of two movies-of-the-week, Amelia Earhart (1976) with Susan Clark and Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight (1994) with Diane Keaton, her life was more often the stuff of fictionalized accounts of modern adventuresses. Most famous was Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong (1933) with Katharine Hepburn as Lady Cynthia, a dashing aviatrix who gets involved with a married member of Parliament and contrives a unique way to put an end to the affair. (Memorably, Hepburn dons a sleek silvery jumpsuit that makes her resemble a moth drawn to the flame of love.) There was also Women in the Wind (1939) with Kay Francis as the flier trying to earn prize money to pay for her brother's surgery. After Earhart's demise, Rosalind Russell played an Amelia-inspired pilot lost in the South Pacific while doing covert intelligence work for the U.S. Navy.

I'm guessing that this year's Earhart revival has less to do with the aviatrix than it does with filmmakers -- such as Anne Fontaine who directed Audrey Tautou in Coco Before Chanel and Nora Ephron who helmed Meryl Streep in the Julia Child film Julie & Julia -- interested in 20th-century heroines who trailblazed new careers for women. Your thoughts?

Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in "Pride of the Yankees"

Few movies have the suspense and thrills of Thursday night's NLCS game between the Phillies and the Dodgers. But for sports fans who crave celluloid pennant races and World Series to fill up the time between actual pennant races and World Series games, may we suggest:

* Alibi Ike (1935) Rubber-faced Joe E. Brown as a rookie hurler for the Chicago Cubs who always has an excuse when he messes up. From the Ring Lardner story.

* Damn Yankees (1958) Aging baseball fan sells his soul to get a decent slugger (Tab Hunter) for the Washington Senators. Gwen Verdon as the Devil's Candy.

* Eight Men Out (1988) John Sayles' absorbing period piece about the 1919 Chicago White Sox team whose members throw the Series stars John Cusack, Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney.

* Fever Pitch (2005) Appealing rom-com starring Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Red Sox diehard and Drew Barrymore as his baseball-averse sweetheart, set during the Sox 2004 miracle season.

* It Happens Every Spring (1949) Charmer starring Ray Milland as a professor -turned-pitcher, creator of a chemical that makes baseballs repel bats.

* A League of Their Own (1992) Penny Marshall's vibrant account of the All-Girls Baseball Leagues stars Geena Davis and Lori Petty as catcher-and-pitcher sisters who face each other in the League World Series.

* The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (2000) Aviva Kempner's terrific documentary out the Hall of Famer who led the Detroit Tigers to multiple World Series while fighting anti-Semitism.

* The Natural (1984) Based on Bernard Malamud's allegorical novel, the film stars Robert Redford as a disappeared baseball legend who returns as the chivalrous slugger of the New York Knights who face the Phillies in the pennant race and the Pirates in the Series.

* Pride of the Yankees (1942) Terrific biopic starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, the Yankees Iron Man who, despite a bad medical prognosis, felt he was the luckiest man in the world. Dare you not to cry.

Your favorites? What am I missing?

The Dude Abides -- John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski."

 A Serious Man, the new movie from the Coen Brothers, arrives -- as so many of their films -- to cheers and jeers. There is no critical consensus on this Story of Job set in 1967 Minneapolis, less funny ha-ha than seriously funny-strange. Believers call it a Biblical parable about a rational man whose life is altered by mystical, perhaps, satanic, phenomena. Here's Roger Ebert, who embraces it as "not a laugh-laugh" comedy, but a "wince-wince" one. Agnostics dismiss  it as "bleak," as does David Denby.  I call it both. (I'll link to my review when it goes on-line, later today.) No one creates atmosphere like the brothers Coen, whose films are a cold fusion of comedy and tragedy, sceptism and certainty, seriousness and frivolity. They are a genre unto themselves. But it's worth noting that whether they;'re mining the serious or frivolous in their narratives, there is likely to be an Avenging Devil (John Goodman in Barton Fink, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Fyvush Finkel in Serious) who blows into town to show that Fate is stronger than Faith.

Salon asked some prominent cineastes to name their favorite Coen Brothers picture. My top-of -head response is Raising Arizona, which tonally is the most consistent. My more considered response is Fargo. For pure fun, I go for The Big Lebowski. You?