Things I want to talk about from This Is Me… Now: A Love Story
Every second newsletter has been about Jennifer Lopez’s new film/musical/visual album and now SO IS MINE.
First off, there are a lot of exclamation points in this, but it’s because I had a good time! Maybe not 100% as good of a time as I was hoping for but if there was a This Is Me… Now: A Love Story — Part Two; This Time With More Punctuation would I watch it? Yes, absolutely!
The funny thing about this film is that the more you describe it, the more amazing and loopy it sounds, but overall it sort of doesn’t live up to its own great description. I wanted it to be MORE unhinged, you see. Apparently they had to cut the budget in half and J.Lo had to kick in $20 million of her own money because no one knew what the fuck she was doing and I wish we had gotten her exact vision! Trust in J.Lo, lads!
The opening sequence where she narrates a Puerto Rican folk tale about star-crossed lovers made me feel a bit seasick because it kept zooming out and out from each Midjourney-looking picture, but there could have been something really cool done with all that gorgeous imagery and rich mythology if there had been more money thrown at it. Who among us would not want to see Jennifer Lopez properly rendered as mythical Taino princess Alida in some kind of Across the Spiderverse style animation? Because I fucking would!
I feel like some reviews were doing overtime in trying to be snarky about the whole endeavour, saying stuff like:
“Unsurprisingly, Alida and Taroo bear a startling resemblance to Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.”
What? That guy looks literally nothing like Ben Affleck. I look more like Ben Affleck than he does. What are you talking about.
“She’s working in a steampunk heart factory but also makes enough wages to live in this huge house? Wuuuuh?”
It’s a DREAM SEQUENCE and you clearly haven’t been PAYING ATTENTION.
(Neither of those are direct quotes by the way, just the gist of some of what I read.)
J.Lo is also being very earnest and sincere in places and this was obviously important to her so I’m glad she made it!
And so, here are the particular things I want to get into from this film, because despite what I just said about people being snarky about it, I too want to make some jokes. But they’re being done with affection! I wish more women were in a position to write and produce and finance their own mad shit!
Okay here we go!
The Zodiacal Council
Like everyone else I enjoyed the council, but also not quite as much as I thought I would. Their jokes felt stilted, probably not helped by the fact that no one was in the same room at the same time, but even proven comedic performers came off clunky and weird! (Jane Fonda was still great in spite of all this.)
As a Cancerian, I was excited to see that Sofia Vergara was representing my star sign, as over the years I have occasionally felt a little hard done by in terms of the name and imagery. I mean, a necklace that reads CANCER doesn’t quite hit in the same way as one that says LIBRA or SAGITTARIUS or literally any other sign. They don’t have to share a name with a horrible disease, but we do and it sucks! As for the crab of it all, I’ve come to embrace the symbolism, but as a child it seemed unfair to me that other star signs got to be LIONS or RAMS or a fucking CENTAUR WITH A BOW AND ARROW. At the time I turned to the lunar zodiac to try my luck there only to find that amongst the dragons and tigers and horses I was born in a Year of the Rat. A fucking rat-crab. Cool.
But back to the film! This was good news, I thought! The memes about Cancer on the many astrology Instagram accounts I follow often boil down to a picture of Sydney Sweeney crying in an episode of Euphoria or Lana Del Rey with a gun. (Actually LDR with a gun would be good, I’d be into that.) So let’s see what Sofia can bring to the visual language of my fellow Cancerians!
“I can see my father’s house from here!”
“Sometimes I eat my hair.”
At one point she’s just sort of squishing her costume around her boobs.
Okay! Great! Thanks guys! Looks like we’re stuck with Cassie crying in the jacks as usual so! In fairness to the council, Post Malone is very funny as Leo, Jenifer Lewis is gas as always, and there’s two of her because she’s Gemini, and Keke Palmer is excellent as Scorpio, a sign that always gets to be sexy and cool while Cancer is depicted as a sensitive crybaby and I’m now realising that maybe I’m playing right into that with everything I’ve just written but HERE WE ARE. 😭 (Also I’ve never understood why Scorpio is a water sign, wtf would a scorpion be doing in the water?? You live in the desert!) I’ll admit it could’ve been worse, considering Capricorn and Aquarius were left for dead for reasons best known to Jen. So R.I.P. TO FAMOUS CAPRICORN JESUS, I GUESS.
J.Lo’s ridiculously young friend group
I know that this was most likely so she would seem younger and also to accommodate the time jumps, but come on now. When Jennifer, (her character is referred to as the Artist in the credits), staggers into her huge house both love-drunk and drunk-drunk with a dirtbag guy on her arm, her friends are lying in wait to do an intervention. And when one of them asks “How old is he?” of dirtbag guy, my notes read, “How old are ALL OF YOU??”
When J.Lo berates them in turn for their own personal and romantic failings, she points out that one of them hasn’t had a relationship “since the sixth grade” which made me think, “Ah yes, and this was when you were a teacher in their school and had been for over ten years, right?” Because even with generous calculations, this character was in her mid to late thirties when any one of these people were in sixth grade. (Which I always translate to being about twelve years old, because that was the age that the sixth grade versions of Jessica and Elizabeth were in Sweet Valley Twins.)
I wish some of the big cameos had been used here instead. Other celebrities in their 50s are women such as Salma Hayek! Kate Beckinsale! Lucy Liu! Halle Berry! Wait, am I just casting an Ocean’s Fourteen now? Shit! Maybe! J.Lo, I have just the thing for your next project!
(HOWEVER in saying all this, there’s a great song and dance sequence where J.Lo gets married and the role of the groom is variously switched around between three different and much younger guys and to THAT I say fair play to you Jen, and good for you casting all your love interests a solid 15-20 years younger like every male lead gets in everything.)
The Heart Factory and Mike’s Wedding
All the factory scenes were so great! I loved them! I wanted MORE heart factory! I want J.Lo’s dystopian sci-fi magical realism film about the petal mill heart factory with group choreography and loads of women slamming their fists into conveyor belts! Let’s go, Posie the Riveter! It was giving Armageddon and the engine room in Titanic with a dash of the enchanted rose from Beauty and the Beast. More of those scenes smushed together with the whole vibe at her friend Mike’s wedding towards the end could be a new Jupiter Ascending! This is a compliment btw! I had tremendous fun watching that film!
For some reason Mike’s wedding takes place at the base of a giant dancing Wicker Man figure decked out with bells and flower garlands and looks like it’s in an alien landscape. It’s lovely! It makes absolutely zero sense considering all the scenes with her friends up to this point take place in ‘real life’, whatever that may be to this film but guess what, I didn’t care! This and the heart factory could be set on opposite sides of the same planet and THAT is a J.Lo film I’d be super into. Those parts alone were better than the last three Marvel films I’ve seen! Yes they’re riddled with CGI but Jesus, at least they were doing something fun and different with it! Also it was all properly lit so I could see what was happening AND hear what people were saying! Things that should not be remarkable in a medium such as this, and yet THEY ARE because sound mixing and lighting have gone to the dogs in cinema and TV for some reason! Old lady yells at cloud!
Also, shout out to Ben Affleck in his role as Rex Stone, a news commentator obsessed with the concept of love who basically embodies the ATN chyron from the credits of each new series of Succession. “Is Europe a country?” got a proper lol out of me.
It’s essentially a bunch of music videos strung together with a hint of plot, but if you haven’t watched it yet, maybe adjust your expectations for balls-to-the-wall lunacy. The balls are not quite to the wall, they’re more like wall-adjacent, but it’s a good time nonetheless.
Okay this was fun, let’s do it again some time!
When J.Lo berates them in turn for their own personal and romantic failings, she points out that one of them hasn’t had a relationship “since the sixth grade” which made me think, “Ah yes, and this was when you were a teacher in their school and had been for over ten years, right?”
Hahahaha