When Jennifer Lopez decides to do something, she will do it, no matter if the public wants it or not. Did anyone ask her to release a high-concept visual album exploring her persona as a hopeless romantic? No. But she made one anyway and it is exactly on-brand.
The second she dropped the trailer for This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, confusion spread across the internet like a five-alarm fire. The word “unhinged” was often used to describe the nearly two minutes of lavish, nonsensical footage teasing Lopez as a gritty action heroine, an ecstatic bride and a morose therapy patient in session with the rapper Fat Joe, who makes an unexpected cameo in the meta musical film alongside Lopez’s fourth husband Ben Affleck, genre-bending singer Post Malone and notable astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, among other names big and small.
Last weekend, the full hourlong spectacle hit Amazon Prime, making good on the guilty-pleasure hype. It begins with Lopez explaining the Puerto Rican myth of Alida and Taroo, star-crossed lovers from enemy tribes. Alida’s father forced her to marry another man. The gods took pity and transformed her into a flower and Taroo into a hummingbird; as the lore goes, the latter flits from flower to flower in an endless search for his beloved.
“Whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,” J. Lo narrates, sounding world-weary, “my answer was always: ‘In love. I want to be in love.’ But I learned the hard way. Not all love stories have a happy ending.”
Choreography, please!
Over subsequent scenes, she reminds us that she can really, truly dance. She leads fantastic group numbers staged within a futuristic “heart factory” and a Love Addicts Anonymous meeting, and she and Derek Hough (playing fictional Husband No. 2) tear up the floor during a wedding-fantasia montage. Meanwhile, Lopez relives her past relationship turmoil —not obliquely, as Beyoncé did in her masterpiece Lemonade, but with extreme specificity. Rather than present her struggles as universal to the human condition, she pokes fun at her polarizing star image: That of an over-the-top, nonstop-glamorama maneater who collects husbands like Liz Taylor. In one self-deprecating moment, she tosses her bridal bouquet into a crowd of skeptical bachelorettes. “Don’t catch it —it’s cursed,” one woman warns another.
High above the clouds, a “Zodiacal Council” judges Lopez’s romantic failures. Each member embodies an astrological sign. Malone and deGrasse Tyson are Leo and Taurus, respectively, with additional random cameos by: Keke Palmer (Scorpio); Sofia Vergara (Cancer); Trevor Noah (Libra); Kim Petras (Virgo); Jenifer Lewis (Gemini); Jay Shetty (Aries); the prominent yogi Sadhguru (Pisces), and in another curveball: Jane Fonda, repping Sagittarius.
“She’s smart, she’s beautiful and she seems so strong,” Fonda laments of Lopez. “Why does she always need to be with somebody?”
“She’s still searching,” Lewis explains.
Back on Earth, Lopez’s inner circle stages an intervention and urges her to get help. She starts seeing a shrink (Fat Joe) and achieves a breakthrough: She must learn to love herself, first and foremost, before diving into the next commitment. Let the healing begin. Post-epiphany, she meanders down a city street. As raindrops pound the pavement, she comes face to face with a hummingbird. Is it Taroo? Ben Affleck in avian form? Someone’s escaped pet? Shock gives way to euphoria. Her soulmate is near, and this time, she’s ready for him. With unbridled joy, she pays homage to Gene Kelly’s fancy footwork in Singin’ in the Rain while half-singing her new song, aptly titled “Hummingbird.” Fat Joe reappears and stops in his tracks. He is just as confused as I am, watching this thing on my laptop.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he bellows.
“You can never give up, Joe! Never give up,” she says, feeling the rain on her skin. (No one else can feel it for her.)
The surreal ode to self-love ends on a cryptic note. We glimpse a hummingbird tattoo on J. Lo’s neck. A man enters the frame. His identity is obscured, but we see a red flower pinned to his suit lapel and a goateed chin resembling that of Affleck. It is a nifty full-circle finale in which Lopez rewrites the Alida/Taroo legend and turns Bennifer 2.0 into modern folklore. I cringe writing this, but it’s true: Lopez and Affleck’s love story contains more sweep, profundity and, yes, unhinged humor than any Lopez-fronted studio romantic comedy. (Even my favorite, The Wedding Planner.)
As an artist, Lopez can’t be separated from her passionate personal life. She famously married and divorced a civilian named Ojani Noa, then dated mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, then married and divorced choreographer Cris Judd, then almost married Affleck, then married and divorced salsa king Marc Anthony, her longest-term husband, then dated ex-Yankee A-Rod for four years before reuniting with Affleck, the Taroo to her Alida. (Or is he Alida to her Taroo?)
In my February 2023 newsletter pegged to Shotgun Wedding, the romcom co-starring Lopez and Josh Duhamel, I wrote that Affleck could’ve easily filled Duhamel’s shoes —that is, if 2003’s Gigli, his disastrous big-screen debut with Lopez, had not bombed so hard.
Lopez and Affleck, who were christened “Bennifer” amid their heady, notorious, 18-month, early-Aughts courtship, rose from the ashes anew and got hitched [in July 2022], and formerly eye-rolling bystanders cheered them on. The second coming of Bennifer dangled the hope that true lovenever dies, and second chances can and do happen outside the movies. Lopez knows that her personal brand is Love, and she’s well-aware that her offscreen romances are the stuff of tabloid dreams. But while she invites media attention (unlike the meet-cute legends Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts), this time around she seems invested in keeping Affleck out of her film projects. She saw how Gigli backfired big-time, doubtless hastening a broken engagement, and neither might want to blur those lines again.
One year later, those lines are blurring. Again. But ever so softly. In This Is Me… Now, Affleck hides in plain sight, donning facial prosthetics and a tacky wig to portray Rex Stone, a cartoonish, bloviating, faux cable news anchor. “All we do is slap sexy graphics and theme songs on videos of people being assholes to one and other,” Stone rants over the headline “TRUE LOVE REAL?” He continues: “We have no love for each other! We have no love for ourselves!”
Lopez planned the film —or rather, extended music video —to coincide with the launch of her eighth studio pop album of the same name. She poured $20 million of her own money into the passion project. When she approached Fonda about joining the Zodiacal Council, the octogenarian balked. She worried that This Is Me… Now would spark criticism and backfire, Gigli-style, especially if Affleck were involved.
“I want you to know that I don’t entirely know why, but I feel invested in you and Ben, and I really want this to work,” Fonda told J. Lo, according to Variety. “However, this is my concern. Like, it feels too much like you’re trying to prove something instead of just living it. You know, every other photograph is the two of you kissing and the two of you hugging.”
“That’s just us living our life,” Lopez explained, ultimately winning her over.
Like the rest of the pop culture-obsessed, Fonda had witnessed Affleck become a walking punchline. His wife glows. She plays the game. And Affleck? His expression often reads I’m so over it, I’m played out. Case in point: That time they went to the Grammy Awards together and the camera caught the actor/director/producer/meme looking as though he’d rather be sitting at home on the couch. Online gossips pounced, manufacturing marital strife out of Resting Bored Face. Quoth Fonda: “I got real scared, you know, with all that sh*t about the Grammys and he looks unhappy and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s happening?’”
Lopez advised Affleck to loosen up, urging, “Relax, be yourself. Have fun. You’re actually a fun guy who is real and genuine and you just seem so serious.”
Recently, he confessed to The Hollywood Reporter, “Do I seem serious? But as in many things, she’s really right. And she loves me. She’s looking out for me. She’s trying to help me. So it’s like, maybe I ought to f—king listen to her.”
So far, he’s listening. Their joint Super Bowl commercial proved a PR win-win for both parties. He showed that he can laugh at himself; she flirted with Tom Brady, winking at herself, too.
For all her shrewd media strategizing, the questions remain: Why did Lopez, a lifelong perfectionist, choose chaos while assembling the weirdness of This Is Me… Now? The rando celebrities? The flash of goatee? Does she realize, or care, what we think?
Part of me wonders whether she’s baiting those of us who can’t resist diva drama. Maybe that’s how she shifts our attention to what she does best: Dance.
Dancing is her No. 1 superpower. She danced her way into the entertainment industry —first as a popular Fly Girl on In Living Color —and hasn’t stopped. (Recall: The 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show; the film Hustlers.) Today, she does so many things that it is easy to forget the origin of her celebrity, the talent behind the headlines that shout her every move. She’s Girlboss meets A-list Instagram influencer (the kind whose brand “collabs” involve posting Reels from luxury private jets and Como: Always Lake Como.) (Never Tahoe: Too rustic.) Several months ago, she unveiled a line of bottled co*cktails inspired by her summer vacations in Capri. Her various ventures can make her career seem, as Ayo Edebiri caught flak for joking, like “one long scam.”
She’s not Beyoncé, a full-package, unrivaled entertainer. She’s not Taylor Swift, a global phenomenon and spiritual movement. She’s not Madonna, whose era-defining music topped the radio charts for two decades. She’s not Mariah, the adored Queen of Christmas.
With This Is Me… Now, she takes cues from Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, the 1988 musical event that spotlighted the controversial performer and his slick moves. The settings: Cinematic. The mood: Emo. The vibe: Extra. The co-stars: Joe Pesci, Sean Lennon and Pee-wee Herman.
Look, she’s got vision, however wacky it might be. Affleck, her best and most unsmiling husband to date, surely agrees.
Hello, there! A programming note for my Bay Area pals: I’m screening A League of Their Own —and signing copies of my bestselling book, No Crying in Baseball —at San Francisco’s iconic Balboa Theater on Thursday night. There will gossip! There will be laughs! There will be NO CRYING!!! Get ticket info here. And thanks, as always, for reading.
Yours in bouquets of newly sharpened pencils~
Erin
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