I watched The Greatest Love Story Never Told (Prime), the laboured and very much told behind the scenes film of This is Me...Now, a deranged new cinematic odyssey/music video/self-financed vanity project from Jennifer Lopez.
The film delivers everything you could wish for from a $20m celebrity puff piece: indulgent monologues from JLo about the trauma of growing up a middle child/her lifelong search for true love, endless footage of Bennifer sipping beverages from massive/bejewelled vessels and an insight into the mind of someone who is willing to finance a multi-million dollar film so she can manifest her own elaborate psychodrama. Thank god for celebrities.
Notable moments include:
- J Lo saying that if nothing else, she wants the movie to prove to the world that love is real (how would we otherwise know?)
- Affleck walking in on a costume fitting where Jennifer's wearing a very fitted dress and looking incredible. Jen says: 'Do I look too fat?' and without missing a beat, he replies, 'Too skinny'.
- Jen on a call with one of her people, working out the dancer Derek Hough's availability to film a wedding scene in the film. When she hears that he isn't free on the day she wants as it's his actual wedding, she pushes back, telling her poor lackey to go away and fix it.
- The bit where she is being shepherded into her car at the end of a shoot day while her team tries to show her mud samples for an upcoming scene. Spoiler alert: she wanted to see options for something wetter.
Most of the film is shot on green screen so you get a depressing insight into the dull banality of what it must be like to be an actor in our CGI-saturated era of movie making. Spending hours in a lime green warehouse where every visual detail is retrofitted in your absence.
The introvert to his wife's extrovert, Affleck acknowledges to the camera how uncomfortable it feels to watch Jen's extensive creative team pore over a folder of their most intimate, private correspondence (which he'd collected since they first met 20 years ago) and then make it into an album, film and behind the scenes film.
He seems extremely therapised about the whole exposing ordeal, conceding that that is the woman he married and that as an artist, she simply must express herself in the way she sees fit.
“I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told.”
Does Jen exhibit this kind of humility and self-awareness? Of course not. But that wouldn't be as much fun.
I better watch This is Me…Now now.
Have you watched? Talk to me in the comments.
See you next time!
Hannah
Beckham, The Supermodels, J-Lo’s Half Time, I’m hypnotically drawn to these self-financed documentaries. They’re like Cadbury’s crème eggs - indulgent, icky, you feel ashamed afterwards but you’ll go back for more.