This Is Me…Now – A Ridiculous Experience (Early Review)

A visual album is a type of album that is usually accompanied by a feature-length film or individual music videos for every song. The film or videos and their visuals are used to emphasize said album’s overall theme and/or serve to enhance the listening experience. Many artists have released visual albums over the years, with the biggest examples arguably being Beyoncé’s Lemonade in 2016 on HBO and Black Is King in 2020 on Disney+. The next artist to throw their hat into the ring is Jennifer Lopez who is set to release her upcoming 9th studio album entitled “This is Me…Now” and an accompanying film with the same name set to release on Prime Video this Friday. While a showcase for Lopez’s new music, the foundation of this 65-minute short film leaves much to be desired. As much as that may be the case, in the end, the film’s ultimate goal is all about creating a connection between the music and audiences, who are likely to skew more towards fans of Lopez and her music than anyone else. As always, art is subjective so this film, perhaps more so than the album, lives or dies on that connection with audiences. Otherwise, as a film in and of itself, though it does have some surprises, is a challenge. 

This is Me…Now, when it comes to a story, if the one here could be considered one, follows the Artist’s (Lopez) complicated history with love, through the good times and the bad. Starting at a young age, all she wanted to do when she grew up was to fall in love and get married but for one reason or another, it never seemed to work out as she simply moved from relationship to relationship looking for someone who she could spend the rest of her life with. Armed with a group of caring friends riding that same roller coaster with her and a therapist (Fat Joe) to confide in, audiences join that roller coaster until something inevitably had to give and lessons were learned. Not exactly the most unexpected outcome, it’s all about that journey where the film hopes to enhance the album’s music by creating an emotional connection between audiences and its themes around love and relationships. Through her experiences in love, the Artist would learn what it truly meant to love and be loved.

Meanwhile, over the course of the Artist’s journey, audiences will be treated to a sequence of ridiculous scenes and some of her new music from the album through a series of high production value musical set pieces that are somewhat entertaining on their own but less as a cohesive whole. Undoubtedly meant to showcase the music on her new album, those set pieces seemingly took precedence over the story to the point that they were used to dictate the story and not the other way around. Because of that, the film merely come off as sequences of utter nonsense tied together by decent musical set pieces. That being said, they are not nearly enough to make for bouts of cheesy melodrama and/or truly horrendous dialog used just about everywhere else.

As mentioned, there was definitely some budget put behind This is Me…Now. It shows in the production design, costume design, choreography, cinematography, and inconsistent VFX. However, for the most part, they are not enough to distract from everything else going on. Whenever the film became what was essentially one music video after another, it was somewhat entertaining to watch. Now whenever it was normal, one can’t help but roll their eyes if they aren’t already cringeing at the bad dialog while those scenes lacked the energy of those musical set pieces. As a result, the acting followed suit. Not the strongest moment for everyone involved in front of camera, the easiest thing to blame is the material. However, an argument could be made that the cast are all phoning it in, except for Lopez who is committed despite the poor script. Without giving anything away, the film offers a boatload of cameos, outside of the ones revealed in the trailer. All of them could be thrown into that conversation.

At the end of the day, This is Me…Now is a ridiculous watch, that is not meant to be viewed through the context of a film, with a few decent musical set pieces sprinkled in. It has flaws but in the eyes of Jennifer Lopez fans, they probably won’t matter. Its only purpose is to be experienced along with her next album and nothing else.

still courtesy of Prime Video

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.