JLO opens up in boldly deranged “This is Me Now … A Love Story”
Jennifer Lopez just loves love. Is that really so wrong?
That’s the takeaway from the actress, singer and dancer’s chaotic, deranged, delirious and hopelessly romantic short film, or video album, or psychotic confessional “This is Me… Now: A Love Story,” in which Lopez, our forever Fly Girl, our perpetual lady of the Block, bares her soul and lets us inside her mind in a way she never has come close to doing before.
Alongside music video whiz Dave Meyers, who has directed hundreds of music videos for the likes of Britney Spears, Aerosmith, Pink, Kid Rock, Kelly Clarkson, Korn, Katy Perry, Kendrick Lamar and just about any other pop star you can think of, Lopez puts slick visuals to songs from her new album “This is Me… Now,” with a host of insane celebrity cameos playing various parts of her id.
Fat Joe plays her Dr. Melfi-like therapist in what might be the most tame casting decision in the film. Elsewhere, Post Malone, Kim Petras, Neil degrasse Tyson, Keke Palmer, Trevor Noah, Sofia Vergara and Jane Fonda play various members of a council of elders who double as her guardian angels who triple as the astrological symbols (!!!), while her hubby, Ben Affleck, plays a barking cable news man with a bad haircut and hideous capped teeth.
What’s going on here? J. Lo is looking for love, or for herself, or for herself within the scope of the songs on her new album. She has a dream — I think it’s a dream? — where she goes off to work at the Heart Factory, where a giant steampunk heart beats and J. Lo and a huge team of factory workers toil away to keep it
Video beating. She goes home to her glass house, where she’s tethered by a bull rope to her husband, who is not Ben Affleck.
She goes to a relationship addicts anonymous group, where she confronts her love of love. She watches “The Way We Were” at home alone and lip syncs to Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, and later visits with her childhood self. And she dances alone in the rain, happy in the knowledge that she’s found herself, as Fat Joe looks on and smiles.
Is this all crazy? Absolutely. It’s also a lot of fun, with quite riveting dance choreography, heavily CGI’D but effectively rendered visuals, and a nakedly honest Jenny from the Block at the center of it all. What do we really know about Jennifer Lopez from a quarter century of tabloid coverage? Not a whole heck of a lot. We know she’s been married four times — her three ex-husbands are depicted here, together, in a wedding reception scene, though not in one-to-one likenesses — but despite her seeming overexposure, she’s never been an open book. Until now, that is, and the way she chooses to depict her attitude toward love and her shamelessly optimistic outlook is endearing. Completely bonkers, but endearing.
“When I was a little girl, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, ‘in love,’” she explains. Lopez finds love in “This is Me… Now,” and thankfully she lets us go along for the wild ride.