review This Is Me…Now: A Love Story - JLo’s tell-all musical flick is bonkers

[samhexum]

Johnny Oleksinski     

Running time: 55 minutes. Rated 13+. Streaming Feb. 16 on Prime Video.

For months, questions have swirled around what exactly Jennifer Lopez’s musical film “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story” would be.

We knew that the movie would feature songs from her new album, also called “This Is Me… Now,” and somehow concern itself with the many highs and Los of her topsy-turvy romances.

Well, now that it’s here in all its gaudy glory, I can reveal that the Amazon flick is a whole lot wilder than touching introspection set to music. This ain’t an acoustic Springsteen on a stool, or Miley in the backyard.

J.Lo has delivered an over-the-top song-and-dance camptacular, both gravely serious and deliriously funny, providing one cuckoo moment after another. It’s easy to imagine Lopez instructing director Dave Meyers, “Let’s get loud.” Her flick is blaring.

An example of how surreal the cinematic therapy session is: Husband Ben Affleck (who made a splash at the Super Bowl) dons a lion’s mane wig to play a cable news host named Rex Stone, who announces on his show called “The Truth” that “love is dead!”

Because the film is such a proudly ludicrous and thinly veiled retelling of actual events, it’s pass-the-popcorn entertaining. If only more A-List celebrities would interpret their headline-making personal lives as an absurd, big-budget musical co-starring Jane Fonda.

I yelped when the “9 to 5” actress, playing an omniscient character called Sagittarius, looked down on J.Lo’s struggles from the cosmos and observed, “It’s like a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ marathon. And it’s four in the morning, and I stop judging them and I start judging myself.”

Sag is a member of the high-in-the-sky Zodiac Council, alongside Trevor Noah (Libra), Kim Petras (Virgo), Keke Palmer (Scorpio), Sofia Vergara (Cancer), Jenifer Lewis (Gemini), Jay Shetty (Aries), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Taurus), Sadhguru (Pices) and Post Malone (Leo), who whimpers, “It makes me super sad. I just wanna give her a big hug!”

Heaven’s top priority, naturally, is Jennifer Lopez.

Or, sorry, not Jennifer Lopez at all. Her character here is called — wait for it — “The Artist.”

Those ethereal beings watch closely as Artist endures a bad breakup with a guy with Affleck’s jawline, marries three times and then learns to love herself in the end. Literally. She croons a song to her inner child in the Bronx who shouts at her, “I didn’t get enough love from you! You left me alone!”

After her dramatic opening split, which is visualized as a motorcycle accident on a vast stretch of water-covered land, Lopez has a kooky fantasy: She imagines that she is an assembly-line worker at the “Heart Factory,” where her and a group a women keep a huge mechanical ticker beating by feeding it flower petals.

“This Is Me… Now” is never aesthetically realistic, per se, but some parts clearly take place in Los Angeles and New York, while others turn into a “Mad Max: Fury Road” perfume ad. You just never know.

On the rebound in the sort-of-real world, she starts dating an angry “New Guy,” who punches the walls of her home — which, not giving a damn about subtlety, is a glass box — and keeps her attached to him using an even less subtle rope.

When that courtship crumbles, the Artist moves on again. During a wedding dance,  J.Lo marries three guys in a Bollywood-y montage.

Part of the fun of watching “This Is Me… Now” is playing a game of “Name That Ex.” Is that dude Ojani Noa, Cris Judd or Marc Anthony? After all her marriages collapse, one fling she drags home with a bottle of booze is a dead ringer for Casper Smart.

It’s that misguided hookup with a far younger man that leads her pals to stage an intervention.

“We think you might be a sex addict,” says one.

“Or a relationship addict,” chimes in another. “Running from one relationship to the next.”

Those blunt bombshells, and the prodding of her therapist played by Fat Joe, results in her attending “Love Addicts Anonymous” — the hits, they keep on coming! — where she performs a moving number called “Broken Like Me” in a gymnasium.

Lopez’s dancing, and all of the vigorous ensemble choreography, is fabulous throughout.

And the $20 million production looks snazzier than your average Marvel movie these days.

The “Singin’ In The Rain”-inspired finale is a heart-warmer. 

But the star is really Lopez’s brain, and how she earnestly determined that the best way to tell the story of the past thirty years would be to have Kim Petras and Post Malone play talking constellations.

And for the life of Jenny from the Block, that was the right call.

 

'This Is Me... Now: A Love Story' review: Jennifer Lopez's tell-all...

NYPOST.COM

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J.Lo has delivered an over-the-top song-and-dance camptacular.

 

Edited February 15 by samhexum
just for the hell of it