The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Jennifer Lopez and ‘Halftime’ kick off Tribeca Festival
The Jennifer Lopez documentary “Halftime” kicked off the 21st Tribeca Festival, launching the annual New York event with an intimate behind-the-scenes portrait of the singer-actor filmed during the tumultuous year she turned 50, co-headlined the Super Bowl and narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination.
The premiere at the United Palace in Washington Heights served as an appropriate opener for the Tribeca Festival, which has jettisoned “Film” from its name to better reflect the wide array of concerts, talks, television premieres, podcasts and virtual reality exhibits that increasingly fill its busy live-event schedule alongside movies.
This year’s festival, running through June 19, will trot out plenty of big personalities, from Al Sharpton (the subject of the festival-closing documentary “Loudmouth”) to Taylor Swift (who will sit for a talk with filmmaker Mike Mills about the 2021 short film she directed), to fill some of Manhattan’s biggest theaters. There will be reunions (Michael Mann’s “Heat”) and directorial debuts (among them Ray Romano “Somewhere in Queens”).
But after a scuttled 2020 edition and a largely outdoor 2021 festival timed to New York’s initial pandemic cultural reopening, Tribeca has turned to Bronx native Lopez, whose hits include “Let’s Get Loud,” to bring Tribeca all the way back.
“Halftime” director Amanda Micheli hopes the documentary, premiering June 14 on Netflix, presents a new — sometimes vulnerable, often resilient — side to its famous subject.
“Halftime” bears some of the usual hallmarks of artist-developed documentaries. It’s designed to be an affectionate portrait. But “Halftime” distinguishes itself by capturing the challenges that even superstars face in an entertainment industry not always welcoming to Latina performers. In one early clip, a journalist asks Lopez about her backside.
For the documentary, Micheli assembled footage shot in late 2019 and early 2020 by Lopez’s team and others, as well as some 1,000 hours of archival footage. In the time span covered in the film, Lopez was starring in and producing the acclaimed drama “Hustlers,” winning her Oscar buzz, and she was tapped to perform in the 2020 Super Bowl with Shakira.
The two events were high points for Lopez yet still reflected some of the struggles she faced along the way.
Micheli thinks that before making “Halftime,” Lopez hadn’t really processed some elements of her life depicted in the documentary.
When Micheli first showed Lopez a 12-minute sample reel of just behind-thescenes footage, she nervously awaited Lopez’s response.
“She looked at me and said, ‘My body’s shaking. I haven’t seen myself like this before,’” says Micheli. “In that moment, seeing herself, she had a realization of what that fighting was for.”