This is Me . . . Now: A Love Story (2024)
Directed by: Dave Meyers
Premise: A companion film to Jennifer Lopez’s album of the same name. Jennifer Lopez examines her love life and numerous marriages through a mix of drama and songs.
What Works: This is Me . . . Now: A Love Story consists of a series of vignettes strung together by a narrative frame. Everything is built around Jennifer Lopez’s romantic history. She’s been married four times and her love life has been a fixture of the tabloids. With This is Me . . . Now, Lopez embraces her public image as a serial romantic and the film contains a bit of self-awareness and self-deprecation on her part. This is Me . . . Now presents Lopez as a hopeless romantic carried away with fanciful notions about love that inevitably collide with reality. That idea is visualized in some interesting ways. The musical number “Rebound” imagines an abusive relationship playing out in an apartment complex of transparent surfaces. It’s an effective metaphor of a famous person in a publicly toxic situation. The set piece for “Can’t Get Enough” imagines three intercut weddings; each ceremony appears to take place at the same location so that one event bleeds into the others. The supporting cast includes a group of Lopez’s friends who act as a Greek chorus and their banter in this scene is amusing.
What Doesn’t: The individual pieces of This is Me . . . Now are fun and creative but they don’t really work as a whole. Each piece is isolated from the other. There’s no visual throughline or consistent image system that gives the picture a shape. This is also a superficial work. The marketing materials for This is Me . . . Now bill the film as a personal statement on Lopez’s part. The movie doesn’t play that way. It’s very shallow. As a production, This is Me . . . Now is plastic and polished. There is little in the film that is organic. The film’s whimsical notions of love are goofy, especially the personification of astrological symbols, which distances the film from its subject. This is Me . . . Now fails as an examination of love because it is rooted in solipsism and conceitedness. Loving relationships are not about one person or something as abstract as the spiritual universe. They are about interactions, sacrifices, and bonds between people. That precisely what’s missing in This is Me . . . Now. Lopez, or at least the character she’s playing, never has meaningful relationships in this film and the men she’s involved with have no dimension or personality.
Disc extras: Available on Amazon Prime Video.
Bottom Line: This is Me . . . Now: A Love Story doesn’t work as a feature film. It’s an interesting collection of music videos but it’s too shallow and too produced to be much of a personal statement and the various parts don’t come together.
Episode: #987 (March 3, 2024)