Surviving J-Lo: Her bonkers film, album & doco
Graham Reid took on JLo’s triple whammy of movie, album and doco, and lived to write about it. Photo / Supplied
When the brightest stars in the pop firmament – Taylor Swift, Adele, Beyoncé – release new albums, the announcement alone often ensures hysteria and hyperbole, expensive videos and soul-baring interviews.
And so we come to Jennifer Lopez’s new album This is Me … Now, its title updating her 2002 album This Is Me … Then.
JLo – we’ll default to the shorthand – is back in love with actor/director and writer Ben Affleck, that famous Bennifer coupling that fell apart two decades ago.
The album and this information arrive as a triple salvo of breathtaking solipsism.
She announces their reunion with not just a 44-minute album (53 minutes in the Deluxe edition) but also a 65-minute film This Is Me … Now: A Love Story, described as “a narrative-driven cinematic odyssey, steeped in mythological storytelling and personal healing”.
In other words, a CGI-enhanced autobiographical-cum-fictional blockbuster about star-crossed lovers from what the publicity calls her heart, her soul and her dreams.
It’s a patchwork of steampunk, dance sequences (a nod to Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis choreographed by award-winning expat Aucklander Parris Goebel), melodrama, myth, references to the films Singin’ in the Rain and The Way We Were, self-aware humour and shameless self-indulgence.
It features – as astrological gods or something – talk show host Trevor Noah, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (enjoying the irony), Broadway star Jenifer Lewis, spiritual adviser and yoga teacher Sadhguru, actress Sofia Vergara and others.
Jane Fonda gets the best lines, among them, “I don’t get it.”
It’s hard to hold on to anything in this totally bonkers but sometimes funny mishmash where JLo, whose acting lurches between misty-eyed romcom and The Bachelor – is variously seen as victim, revolutionary, heroine, misunderstood, lover, cougar, wounded, bride, clothes horse …