Movie Review: J.Lo’s Very Wacky, Very Wild, Very L.Lo Journey to Love in ‘This Is Me … Now’ 

This image released by Prime shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story." (Prime via AP)
This image released by Prime shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story." (Prime via AP)
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Movie Review: J.Lo’s Very Wacky, Very Wild, Very L.Lo Journey to Love in ‘This Is Me … Now’ 

This image released by Prime shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story." (Prime via AP)
This image released by Prime shows Jennifer Lopez in a scene from "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story." (Prime via AP)

OK, so maybe we’re not tracking her jet travel online like amateur spies, or worrying on a diplomatic level whether she’ll make it to a football game.

But current Swift-mania aside, let’s not forget that another force of nature, J.Lo, has been the ultimate celebrity for decades. Singer. Dancer. Rom-com actor, charismatic and charming. Social media queen, and yes, tabloid magnet, with the very public ups and downs of her love life. Jennifer Lopez, now 54, has been doing this pop icon thing for a very long time, and very well.

All of which is to say that when she sings now that she Ben Affleck don’t need to care about how others feel, well, who are we to argue? Who are we, really, to argue with J.Lo about anything?

Which is perhaps the perfect vantage point from which to assess the curious 65-minute creation that is “This is Me... Now: A Love Story,” the movie accompanying her album out Friday. Some will call it a mere music video — it’s directed by Dave Meyers, who’s done hundreds — but it’s heftier than that. And if the plot feels truly chaotic, blending (deep breath here, please) mythology, astrology, autobiography, confessional, modern romantic comedy and Old Hollywood glamour (still with us?), it is so J.Lo — so very, very J.Lo — that it feels logical, too.

Whether that means the film is, well, good, is probably a matter of how you feel about Lopez. Certainly, she’s brought everything to the table here: her talents, her fertile imagination and her wallet, too, self-financing when money fell through, to the tune of a reported $20 million. Talk about self-belief, which is the moral of the film, if expressed rather too quickly and conveniently. If you can’t love yourself, Lopez and co-writer Mark Walton tell us, you can’t really love anyone else.

Anyway, we told you there was a plot, so here goes. Lopez, though channeling her own life, doesn’t have a name in the film — she’s billed as “Artist.” But before we meet her, we begin with Puerto Rican mythology: the story of Alida and Taroo, star-crossed lovers from enemy tribes. They can’t be together, so the gods turn her into a red flower (Lopez appears in the animation as Alida), and Taroo into a hummingbird, destined to forever seek her. The Artist heard the tale as a child and decided what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love.”

Now we see the modern Artist on the back of a motorcycle, riding across a beach, with a hunky man, face shielded. Then, screech — the motorcycle crashes. “Not all love stories have a happy ending,” she says.

The Artist’s adventure with love takes us to a “Metropolis”-like sequence in a very dystopian-looking factory, its purpose not fully clear but in any case, a great setting for one of many dance numbers. Lopez still has it, if you wondered. Turns out, though, the depleting oxygen and dancers in hazmat suits are all part of a dream. We learn this in the Artist’s therapy session the next day with her shrink (rapper Fat Joe).

He asks how it’s going with the new guy. Not so well, it turns out — the guy’s a Libra (astrology is ever-present) and, more to the point, violent, as we learn in the song “Rebound” about a toxic relationship, with a powerful dance sequence that has her continually pulled back into an abuser’s clutches.

Time for the Zodiac Council to weigh in. Yes, up in the stars, led by Jane Fonda, yes Jane Fonda, not as J.Lo’s mother-in-law this time but as Sagittarius, yes the sign, who peers down at our girl and says: “I don’t get it!” Yup, agrees Libra, played by Trevor Noah — Libras and Leos are supposed to go well together. And so it goes, with others chiming in: Keke Palmer as Scorpio, Post Malone as Leo, Sofia Vergara as Cancer, Kim Petras as Virgo and even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as Taurus.

This wacky group is a celestial counterpart to a band of well-meaning friends down on Earth, those typical rom-com buddies who stage an intervention into her love life. Is the Artist a love addict? Another addiction — to weddings, wink wink! — is explored in a big number where Lopez marries three different grooms.

It won’t shock you that the Artist ultimately learns to love herself, with a return to her roots (this is, after all, Jenny From the Block). If she didn’t, we wouldn’t have an audacious — but fun — recreation of Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” We also wouldn’t have reason to hear the triumphant songs that comprise the new album, coming more than 20 years after “This is Me ... Then,” written during her first go-round with Affleck.

Famously, they broke up. Famously, they reunited. (Now-husband Affleck appears here, in a sly cameo we won’t spoil.) We watched it all. And we’ll keep watching this most durable of superstars. There will be more to come. But this is her, now.



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
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Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.