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By Alex Pappademas
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Yesterday it was reported that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez could bring Exercise 6 to Splitsville. It’s also imaginable that all is well and gossip says too much about a few weeks of finding a perfectly innocent position to stay, attending solo events, and blindly appreciating Instagram posts about partners with problematic communication styles; We don’t know anything you don’t, but if this news cycle makes you feel an above-average point of interest about the inner workings of the Bennifer relationship, there’s a movie from 2024 you want to watch right away.
In February, Jennifer Lopez released her first studio album in nearly a decade, This Is Me…Now, and This Is Me…Now: A Love Story, a significant meta-autobiographical film of that album directed by music video legend Dave. Meyers; Two weeks later, Lopez released The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a Jason Bergh documentary about the making of Meyers’ J-Lo film. In the campy but cowardly earnest This is Me…Now: A Love Story, Lopez plays a character called “Artist” who endures a series of complicated relationships, talks to a therapist played by Fat Joe, and a pantheon of zodiac deities, including which includes Kim Petras. She. She Array Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jane Fonda and Post Malone, and refuses to stop herself from believing in true love. It’s necessarily J-Lo’s Lemonade, if instead of dissing Jay-Z, Lemonade had been an allegorical film about how Ben Affleck’s love heals all wounds, and it’s a very important piece of the puzzle of this moment in history of Bennifer; forward looking at it second. She begins with Bergh’s make-of, a map that turns out to be larger than the territory it covers.
As a society, it’s not hard for us to have private, close-up documentaries about prominent musicians, but we have yet to see a film that brings us as close to a star as Lopez, whose fame was forged when celebrities distributed it. . intimate access with much more parsimony and only the Kardashians have nurtured each and every moment of awakening from the mouth of content. Love Story gives us a lot of J-Lo as an uncompromising editor under the pressure of deadlines, sipping from a jeweled bottle of water while refusing to budge on budget meetings, dancing as loud and fast as he can, making every moment count, answering questions like, “Can we show you some general options?”even as his white SUV pulls away at the end of a long night shoot. But at the beginning of the film, Lopez confesses what we’ve all intuitively known all along, which is that “J-Lo” is an arrogant character created by Lopez who doesn’t fight like the real thing. Lopez fights.
The film follows Lopez’s resolve to self-fund This Is Me. . . Now, the $20 million song when a sponsor gets involved with the announcement of the potential task and abandons it, setting the tone for a movie about a very different Lopez. A vulnerable man. A human being performing an incredibly private task that worries him out loud, quote, “suck a fucking cock. “We see her without makeup, ready for the camera, and we see her admit that “it’s not like someone’s clamoring for J-Lo’s next record,” and we see her tired and out of breath after filming intense dance sequences, and we see her say things like, “I know I’m so much older than everyone else now. . . They are all 22 years old. She’s scared all the time, he says, but he doesn’t let anyone see it: “It’s the secret,” he says, “of my whole fucking career. “
Love Story is also, and more importantly, a portrait of the Affleck-Lopez marriage and an exploration of whether love is strong enough to unite two other people who disagree intellectually on important issues. In an intense moment, Affleck connects his own illness, alcoholism, with López’s preference for being noticed and popular and for gaining followers on Instagram; Clearly, if he’s learned anything from his thirty years in the spotlight, it’s that living a very public celebrity lifestyle when you’re concerned about your sobriety and general intellectual aptitude is like licking the floor of a chicken coop if you’re involved. . about the bird flu, but it’s equally clear that he’s willing to put those reservations aside for Lopez because he believes in her as an artist, and if part of his artistic process comes to the point of letting go of all his personal emails and her love . letters in a folder and leave that folder for her dancers and all the other members of her artistic team to look to for inspiration. So let it be so. It’s true love and unconditional support, but Affleck also reminds Lopez, in a tense moment: “You don’t have to wear that, you don’t have to wear anything. ” »
Greatest Love Story is a fantastic film about a superstar’s contradictory desire to be safe at the moment of creation, but also to be noticed at the moment of creation; It’s also an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of two other people that one might get the idea that maybe they don’t tell us anything else. “I don’t know why,” Jane Fonda tells Lopez via Zoom in one scene, “but I feel like invested in you and Ben. ” We dare you to watch this movie and not feel the same way.
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