Jennifer Lopez is still full of artistic surprises. After learning she’s Netflix’s shining movie star, Jenny goes back to the Block, and makes a new album. Yes, This Is Me…Now: A Love Story could have phoned it in and been Space Jam: Legacy levels of promotion for Lopez’s new album. Instead, real thought and work went into this romantic drama musical, making it a delight amongst the dregs of dumpuary. I should have expected nothing less from JLo, who always works hard to be the best she can be, sometimes dragging mediocre things into greatness by her sheer force of will.
Who is JLo…Now? Well, as the Artist, she ties two things together for this musical album movie. 1) We get her personal story about her devotion to falling in love over and over again, from the Ben Affleck breakup in 2004 through all her failed relationships until the Affleck rekindling today. 2nd, we get a Disney like Puerto Rican fable Alida and Taroo, which Lopez ties to the last 20 years of her life through musical and visual splendor.
OK, I completely undersold the splendor you’re about to see. The visual palate of This Is Me…Now is the straw that stirs JLo’s Love Potion #9. We really go on a crazy creatively rich journey. Our initial location is a steampunky futuristic factory housing a mechanical beating heart fueled by flowers that’s even cooler to look at than it sounds writing out. We then go into a hyper modern fully glass apartment building, up into an astrology themed sky council, and conclude at Lopez’s version of a Singin in the Rain montage. Each song gets its own unique visual palate and wardrobe, helping keep the audience engaged in the quasi vanity production. In all situations, the fashionably adept Jennifer Lopez makes sure everything looks immaculate, putting millions of her own dollars into making these sets complement the gorgeous costumes she wants to wear. And for a 55 year old woman, Jenny can still dance like she’s from the Block as well, g’damn.
Smartly though, this isn’t a concert film like The Eras Tour or Renaissance. Lopez promotes this album through a story first, that loosely connects to each of the songs in This Is Me…Now. Meaning, we’re getting 5-7 little short films, beautifully staged, with Lopez giving different performances and dance numbers depending on what the scenes need. Like any movie, we’ve got high drama and emotional stakes, with Lopez trying to figure out her relationship to love, and unlike any movie, we’ve got a zodiac themed cameo fest featuring a wild mixture of random people for some lighthearted transitions, as JLo gets ready to musically therapize herself. The the adorable, simple, and powerful Alida and Taloo tale neatly fits into the movie album’s emotional through line just enough, making This Is Me…Now Jennifer Lopez’s incredible, sometimes psychotic, sometimes straight up weird, fairytale she wants her life to be.
And for someone as prolific as Jennifer Lopez, I hope she is living that fairytale right now. Although, I’m curious about who Ben Affleck chooses to play in This Is Me…Now. One character I understand. The other? I bet he begged a little to do that one, since he already has some great experience doing something like it on SNL before.