The new(ish) Jennifer Lopez vanity project This is Me ... Now: A Love Story was not on my radar until I heard them half-guffawing about it, half sort of copping to a guilty pleasure affection for it on a February episode of The Slate Culture Gabfest. (I've gotten behind on my podcast listening.)
The discussion didn't state the length of This is Me ... Now, but when I got home I discovered it was 66 minutes, which might barely meet my criteria for a movie, and one I could add to my 2024 rankings in progress since it was released on Amazon in February.
But I'm not sure if it ultimately qualifies, and that's where you come in.
First I will state the arguments in favor of it being a movie:
1) It has movie-style closing credits, with a creatively designed graphic theme and an endless scrawl of people who worked on it. In fact, the scrawl is so endless that it rivals something like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which is both a point in its favor and a point against it (more on that in a minute).
2) It is a fictionalized and symbolic interpretation of Lopez' real struggles with finding the man of her dreams. It opens with her working in a factory where they are trying to keep a giant metal heart beating, some kind of steampunk fever dream. Lopez hired real actors (such as Jane Fonda) as well as real musicians (such as Post Malone) and real personalities outside of either acting or music (such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson) to portray roles in the "film" (it's a film even if it's not a movie, since there are also a thing called short films).
3) It appears alongside other theatrical and streaming releases in one of my go-to resources to check the release dates of new movies, which is the Wikipedia page called "2024 in film" (or whatever year it happens to be). That page has sub pages that show the films released by individual countries. Under "American films" its shows a February 16th release date for the Lopez vehicle, two days after Madame Web and six days before Drive-Away Dolls, those other two obviously qualifying as feature films. (How This is Me ... Now did not make a Valentine's Day release, I have no idea.)
Now, against this being a movie:
1) Although the total running time is 66 minutes, the aforementioned endless crawl of credits starts at 53:30. (I went back and checked.) If the actual content of the movie stops well short of the hour mark, then we are getting into the dangerous territory of Taipei Suicide Story, the 2021 film I saw and loved through an online subscription to that year's Slamdance, but which I rejected for inclusion in that year's rankings because of its 45-minute running time. I have decided that old films that run 45 minutes -- the primary example being Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. -- will get included on my various movie lists because standard feature film length had not yet been codified back then. (Though 45 minutes is about my cutoff, as I can't see included a 20-minute film as a feature film.) But something that short today is a different matter. This Is Me ... Now is only a possibly insignificant amount longer than Taipei Suicide Story, though you do always factor in the credits to the length of the film. I just think how more modest credits would have brought the thing in under an hour, at which point I would have had a really hard time including it.
2) I have not seen Beyonce's Lemonade, though if I had, I feel like I would have considered This is Me to be some kind of answer to it. Not an answer to its content, but an answer to its place in the culture. Lopez is a classic attention seeker and she measures her own musical abilities in relation to genuine giants like Beyonce. Lopez may be just as famous as Beyonce, but no one -- even Lopez herself if she were being honest -- thinks of them as equivalent talents. Still, if Lopez saw that Lemonade was a movie made in support an album, you can see her saying "I can do that, too" and putting in $20 million of her own money to make it happen. (Yes, she did that.) The relevancy of the Lemonade comparison is that I never thought that project sounded like something I would rank if I had seen it that year -- though to be fair, IMDB refers to Lemonade as a "TV special" and has no such designation for the Lopez film.
3) And speaking of the Lemonade comparison, there is the nagging impression I have that This is Me is "just" a glorified music video. People have made long music videos before, testing the standard length of a single song by including lots of other plot material in addition to the music itself. ("Thriller" is the template for that, though other pretentious musicians have copied and expanded on the non-pretentious thing Michael Jackson was doing.) Then again, This Is Me ... Now is not a single song, but rather, something like eight from the new J-Lo album, each of which has about a three-minute showcase, comprising about half of the total running time -- but only half, it is probably useful to note. Half of it is definitely something else ... and whether it is guilty pleasure good, just plain bad, or a pathetic display of Lopez' needy inner self is up for debate.
So I am not going to assume you are actually going to comment on this post. You don't do it all that often. That's fine. We're not putting you under a microscope today.
But because of that, I should probably tell you where I'm leaning after writing all this stuff out.
I noticed that in each of my three reasons to include it as a movie, I felt those reasons strongly and stated them unambiguously. In each of three reasons not to consider it a movie, I included a "yeah but." This tells me that not only do I want to include it, I can poke holes in my reasons not to.
So I probably will. But as you'll note if you look to the right -- fairly soon after I publish this, I should say -- I haven't yet. The last newly watched movie is still last Wednesday's Dial M for Murder, not the short J-Lo thingamabob I watched over two nights on Thursday and Friday. I've got to hurry up and make the choice, though, because I watched half of Five Nights at Freddy's on Sunday night, and I'd like to make up my mind before I finish that.
If we do want one final piece of circumstantial evidence that this is a movie, we need look no further than the fact that I did, in fact, have to break it up over two nights. Of course, I didn't have to -- but it turned out I was too tired when I started watching and I was nodding off nearly from the start. (Having some drinks earlier with my sister was a decisive factor.)
The circumstantial evidence does seem to be in the film's favor. I just wish I had a more firm love-it-or-hate-it take on it. There were some things I liked, some things I laughed at (because they were laugh lines) and some things I laughed at without that being the filmmakers' intention.
Incidentally, if I do include it, that'll mean that the last week of May was dominated by Jennifer Lopez movies, this coming on the heels of my Atlas viewing. That one was for Netflix, so Lopez finds herself right in the middle of the streaming wars, doesn't she.
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