This is Me … Now: A Love Story review – JLo’s bombastic ode to love and herself

Star’s self-funded big swing is a mix of over-produced music videos and self-help advice but showcases her undeniable screen magnetism

It might not have scored her the Oscar nomination she deserved (and hungered for) but Jennifer Lopez’s canny, all-guns-blazing performance in Hustlers was still a validating win for an actor, and a fanbase, who sorely needed one. Lopez had been the best thing in a cascade of increasingly middling movies, her career defined by the inability to take a risk, to be unlikeable or messy or inelegant, and so the star’s rougher, more interesting edges had been sanded down to nothing.

Her latest project is, in a way, all risk, something that’s become front and centre of her recent press tour, when Lopez revealed that her $20m big bet – a hokey, hard-to-define cinematic accompaniment to her new album – is self-funded. While it might not feel like money well spent from afar (this is surely not a film intended for a wide audience), it’s less about what we get from watching it and more about what she seems to have got from making and co-writing it. This would usually be how one describes the worst kind of vanity project and while there are certainly a lot of markers here, the whole endeavour is far too harmless and far too proudly sentimental to fully deserve such a traditionally mean-spirited definition.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/RUeb3WA