Is this a movie: This is Me ... Now: A Love Story

This is the first in what I hope will be a periodic series in which I ask you, my reader, if something I have seen is a movie or not.

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. 

My first Slamdance, and reconsidering feature length

The virtual Slamdance is wrapping up today, and I've "attended" for the first time this year.

Unlike some film festivals that have limited their audiences to the region (MIFF being one), Slamdance 2021 was available for anyone who wanted to subscribe. My wife did so for her work, and I reaped the benefits.

The reaping was fairly limited, though. I only watched two proper feature length films, Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers' A Brixton Tale, which had some promise but ultimately did not fully come together, and Agnieszka Polska's Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!, in which I never really got my bearings. I don't have anything further to say about either at the moment.

I do have thoughts on something I watched that was not proper feature length, but is making me reconsider how exactly I define that. 

Background: I am a strict adherer to perceived rules -- when it comes to how I define and classify cinema, anyway. I've written about it before and I suspect you are at least somewhat familiar with my stance on the subject.

My most recent writings about it related to Steve McQueen's Small Axe film series last year, which won huge amounts of critical praise, but bent a lot of us out of shape in determining how to categorize to it. For one, it was made for television, which typically disqualifies a series of "movies" from discussions about the year's best "films." The more salient trait for today's post, though, is that most of those "films" are barely over 60 minutes, making them dubious candidates as feature films on length alone. I ultimately didn't watch them in time for last year's rankings, and am sorry to say I still have not.

But the issue has come up for me more recently than that. A few weeks ago I got contacted to review a documentary called The Astrology of Pandemics, whose title really piqued my interests. I was all set to request a screener link when I saw the movie is only 42 minutes long. Recoiling at this oddball length, I had to tell the publicist, "I'm not sure how to say this without sounding snooty or arbitrary, but we usually stick to feature length films for reviews."

So that brings us to Slamdance. A couple nights ago my wife told me about a film called Taipei Suicide Story, directed by someone with the single moniker KEFF, that she'd watched and loved while out of town. She texted me "You probably have a million things to watch right now [for once that's not true] but I just watched Taipei Suicide Story and it's great -- only 46 minutes."

Only? 

That's not a selling point actually. It's a point of great consternation for a slave to categorization like me.

A point of consternation that wouldn't have mattered to me if I hadn't actually watched it.

I hadn't been planning to. But when the kids and I joined my wife out of town on Wednesday night, I needed something shortish to watch after feeling exhausted from a long and busy day of packing, working, and driving 90 minutes to meet her down in a coastal area on the Mornington Peninsula.

My first choice would have been just an episode of TV, something like Snowpiercer, the first season of which I am still slogging my way through, and the only show I'm watching that she isn't. But she reminded me of Taipei Suicide Story and its 46-minute run time, and I decided "Fuck it. Categorization be damned."

Now, this was not a snap reconsideration of my ideas of what qualifies a movie for inclusion on my lists. Rather, it was a snap decision not to worry about if I watched something without being able to add it to those lists. 

This is a surprisingly strong motivator for me. I have enough of a collector mentality that I shy away from things that I can't "collect" via inclusion on my lists. This doesn't apply to TV, obviously -- I don't have a list of the TV shows I've watched (yet, though I am thinking about starting one). But with movies, it does, and it's been a big factor in why I have not watched many short films over the years. The lack of access to them combined with their incompatibility with my lists has made it easy for me just to give them a miss, to use the Australian lingo. 

Taipei Suicide Story is not a short film. I think we would agree that 46 minutes is too long for a short -- though I note that IMDB lists The Astrology of Pandemics as a short at 42 minutes. IMDB does not give TSS that same designation, but that could just be inconsistency in their approach.

However, there could be something to that 45-minute line of demarcation. When once struggling with the length of the Buster Keaton classic Sherlock Jr., I decided that as long as a silent film was at least 45 minutes it could earn inclusion on my lists. Length standards were different back then, and I didn't want to categorically dismiss films made before 1930. The new freedom enabled me to add Sherlock Jr. to my lists and to give it the full five stars it so richly deserves.

There is a similar potential motivating factor behind Taipei Suicide Story. See, it is by far the best thing I've seen so far in 2021. 

Just to give you a little plot, it has to do with a clerk who works at a Taipei suicide hotel, where guests check in and they never check out. Or sometimes they do check out, if staring into the void causes them to reconsider their course of action. But each morning cleaning teams move from room to room, hauling out bodies and wiping down blood spatters, wearing full PPE. Except in one room where a woman has been in a state of uncertainty all week, having hung a maintenance sign on her door to dry to draw out her limbo until she can make a decision either way.

As my wife pointed out, upon my grumbling about the category confusion, it doesn't need to be any longer than it is, for what it is. And she's absolutely right. It tells the story it needs to tell in the exact amount of time it needs to tell it, which allows it to invest us in the characters, and all other things a good feature film does well. If it had stayed another 25 minutes to push it into clear feature length territory, maybe it wouldn't seem like such a tight little bit of melancholy loveliness. 

So if I were ranking Taipei Suicide Story, it would go straight to the top of the list of 12 titles I've seen so far this year. It would be an easy call.

Now, to decide whether I should actually do that.

Having so recently argued against Small Axe -- more passionately on the grounds of it being TV than it being too short -- I find myself flirting with hypocrisy by talking about Taipei Suicide Story (which is shorter than all the Small Axe movies by 15 minutes) as a movie I want to rank for 2021. The difference, of course, is that I was making that Small Axe argument in the abstract, not having seen those movies, while the more tangible nature of my current situation allows me to make the opposite argument. The same thing probably would have happened with Small Axe. No one who watched them decided not to make them eligible for ten best lists, and fearing I would do the same, I just decided not to watch them in time.

But with my wife's urgings and my own need for something short on Wednesday night, not to mention a closing window of opportunity to watch it before the Slamdance movies went offline, I have indeed seen this movie, and now I've got a Big Question on my hands.

I can tell you that in the short run, I have not added it to any lists. Then again, I have not updated my lists since about Tuesday, meaning they do not yet show my earlier viewing of The Lady from Shanghai (speaking of things with references to China in the title) either. Until I have actually omitted TSS from a running list that includes movies I saw after it, I haven't really made up my mind, I guess.

Not to say that doing that will make up my mind either. I can go back and add it later. But will I?

If I'm trying to rationalize in favor of adding the movie to my lists, including my 2021 running rankings, I could say the following: "A film has to be one of two things: a short or a feature film. If it's not one, it has to be the other." And there's a certain logic to that. We don't have a third way of categorizing films, and I think we've agreed that a 46-minute film ceases to be a short. So in this scenario it would have to be a feature.

But maybe Taipei Suicide Story just breaks the mold, and forces us to consider whether a third category is necessary -- and whether these categories will even mean anything ten years from now when fewer and fewer films appear in the theater. That's the big argument in the other direction, which is that this movie has no good venue for playing to the public. Forty-six-minute films just don't play in cinemas, at least not unless they are packaged with another 46-minute film, though the odds that two such odd ducks would be thematically compatible with one another are pretty slim. Simply put, people don't make 46-minute films because they want to have some prospect for recouping their investment. When a theatrical screening is not an option for that, it means you may have a highly unprofitable film. 

But as all movies go increasingly to streaming venues, it may start to matter less how long they are, just how good they are. How many features have you seen, even shorter features, that had 20 minutes more content than they needed to reach their maximum potential impact? Instead of padding itself out with B plots or drawing out interactions to a point where they become banal rather than poignant, Taipei Suicide Story just embraces the shorter running time. Should we punish it for that?

Maybe KEFF, whoever he or she is, just has a more enlightened view on all of this than the rest of us do. And as I was looking at KEFF's credits on IMDB, I noticed one other directing credit: 2019's Secret Lives of Asians at Night. Which is listed as a short, whereas TSS is not.

If it's good enough for IMDB, maybe it's good enough for me? Maybe?

I suspect I will continue thinking about this for a while.

Hey, at least it's not TV. *shudder*