How a slew of bizarre vanity projects by J-Lo have the star looking less Jenny-from-the-Block and more J-Lusional

If you’ve been on social media the past few days, you’ve no doubt come across one project or another being promoted by singer J-Lo, aka: actor Jennifer Lopez, with much of the content looking like trying too hard to prove her worth.

There’s a documentary (or glorified music video, depending on how you see it), mostly about J-Lo, and allegedly encouraged by her husband, actor Ben Affleck, in which she aims to capture all that is humble and relatable about herself on camera. Titled This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, the doco looks like one long exercise in vanity – it even has its own Comi-Con-like Q&A clip on YouTube, titled The Greatest Love Story Never Told.

But the video really going viral is a short clip where J-Lo is taking her hair out (of a bun, I assume, the viral vid just starts with her hair looking messy), tossing her locks from side to side, saying something about being reminded of when she was a teen in the Bronx, “runnin’ up and down the block”, presumably to remind us that this is Jenny from the Block we’re watching and that she’s just like us, only much, much richer. Actual residents of the Bronx have responded on social media, saying they’d rather she stop pretending she is like them.

Back to the doco, it’s being described as a “romantic drama musical film” (on Wikipedia, anyway) and is supposed to be a tie-in for the release of J-Lo’s ninth studio album, This Is Me… Now (as opposed to her 2002 album This Is Me… Then). It gets vainer…

In one scene she curls up on a huge couch mouthing Barbra Streisand’s lines in The Way We Were. In another she sits in group therapy talking a lot about herself (the perfect setting for her). She shows lots of self-imposed hard choreography. And there are lots of red flower petals. There’s even a dream sequence where Lopez’s heart is represented by a giant, combustible apparatus operated by dancing factory workers and fueled by rose petals.

The New York Times described the film as “unnerving”, going on to say that it’s really just “a self-salute to Lopez and her own longevity”. Vox, meanwhile, calls it “a musical-biopic-fantasia-mess”.

In short, it’s a film about J-Lo loving J-Lo and thinking J-Lo has all the answers to Life’s big questions while posing absolutely nothing of value in the way of education, enlightenment or entertainment, unless you’re an absolute fan. And there’s no bigger J-Lo fan than J-Lo herself.

The film is the literal definition of conceited, and even when the star is trying to highlight she has had some tough times, there is no way in hell, no way, that you feel one second sorry for her. She has a handsome, rich, famous husband. She is beautiful, rich and famous herself. Her children are healthy and have everything they need. She gets anything she wants at her beck and call. And her ego is forever satiated by the many films and videos she’s lent her looks to (and sometimes her talent). J-Lo is massively big. Or at least her ego now is, with this recent slew of projects certainly taking care of that.

You know, it was humbling to see celebrities living it tough like the rest of us during Covid times but just because your home-made video went viral back then doesn’t mean the poor-pitiful-me routine can be pulled off half a decade later. The new online audience is smart enough to call bullshit on celebrity ego-driven vanity projects.

The new audience also doesn’t care how relatable celebrities think they are to us. Just be you: rich, fabulous, living a luxurious lifestyle. Don’t rub that shit in our face, dressed in designer gear head-to-toe while reminiscing about some fucking boring childhood moment back when you were poor.

You want to relate to the Culture? Stay up there on stage or screen and entertain us. That’s your job. And in J-Lo’s case, she’s doing a remarkable job. In fact, we haven’t laughed at shit like this for months… or at least since Madonna demanded audiences applaud for her (but got crickets instead) at the 2023 Grammys, and Lars Ulrich said Metallica could “mentally” continue for another 20 years (that said, AI and infinite royalties would be right up greedy Ulrich’s alley).

But back to J-Lo. If she thinks she has been put on God’s green earth to save us from anything, she seriously needs to rethink what her calling is.

Which brings me to the next project: Atlas – a sci-fi thriller film that stars J-Lo as an action heroine, or more to the point, “a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence,” according to its press release. The point is J-Lo is saving mankind from, I dunno, something bad. There are literal bleeding hearts in the trailer, and an important bit of J-Lo marching towards the camera, Transformer-type robots and lots of explosions, but I’m confused by the entire project. Then again, I’ve never been one for action movies.

Some armchair critics are referring to the film as a loose adaptation of the gaming series Titanfall. And some fans say they’re looking forward to the star’s appearance in an action movie rather than a rom-com. I’m bored of it all myself – in fact, the less I see of J-Lo trying to prove her acting chops on celluloid, the happier I’ll be. Still, I’m shocked to see Netflix is behind all of this. I suppose money really does talk.

As if these two filmic offerings weren’t enough, there’s a third movie soon to be released called Unstoppable which is described as a “biographical sports drama” produced by husband Affleck, about an American athlete born with one leg who goes on to win heaps of sporting trophies. J-Lo plays the dude’s mother and whether that means she’s being made up to look older than she is, or she’s performing as someone younger in flashback scenes, we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, it’s a drama and we know the girl likes drama.

J-Lo on the set of ‘Unstoppable’ for which the legacy media is more concerned about her fake arm tattoos than her acting chops.

On the music front, J-Lo is continuing to push her new album, the aforementioned This Is Me… Now and has even announced a tour in conjunction with the album promotion (recently cancelling dates due to the lack of ticket sales). With the album’s release comes the obligatory music clips packed with pseudo violent scenes, such as the made-up DV in the clip for Rebound counterbalanced by vain-glorious me-me-me-ness, eg: her video for the song Can’t Get Enough.

What I can’t get enough of is the hilarious live footage promoting the new album. There’s one video for the title track that’s been dubbed an Apple Music Live venture and it really should embarrass both J-Lo and Apple Corp. Dressed in a nude bodysuit emblazoned with roses, you’ll be aghast at the costume at first, then absolutely shocked when you see the backup dancers dressed as giant red velvet roses. Yes. Huge. Red. Dancing. Rose blooms.

Every dancer is dressed like a big red flower and it’s worse than watching an end-of-year high school rock eisteddfod. J-Lo doesn’t fair better, dressed in her nude/rosey bodysuit that virtually dips into camel toe territory. Seriously, I thought this woman had all the money and stylists in the world to ensure that a fashion catastrophe like this doesn’t happen. But it’s there, and all I know is someone in her crew needs to start watching RuPaul’s Drag Race to get this wardrobe and costuming in order.

While watching the clip, you keep thinking how vain the whole J-Lo show is, and it doesn’t surprise me to read online that it’s part of a 20-million dollar self-financed affair that might have been cooked up on the back of a napkin one night. Or are things more Machiavellian than that? (More on that in a sec.) Why nobody in her circle told J-Lo that nobody cares much about her relationship or the more trivial goings-on in her life is beyond me.

There are even ‘discussion panels’ that’ve been created, made to look as though J-Lo and her crew members are taking part in some Comi-Con event when quite obviously it’s been set up by themselves. In one of these videos, J-Lo arrives (fashionably late), slumping into her seat and immediately punching out, “Questions!” It’s like old-school PR tried to go for a cool convention vibe but failing miserably. It’s disaster from the get-go; indeed when the host of the panel first sits down in a wonky half-director’s chair, her plastic cup of water falls and spills onto the floor. A definite sign that even a pseudo-scripted setting like this needs basic genuine direction.

Not even J-Lo seems convinced she loves herself enough to keep this shitshow going.

These past two weeks, we’ve been given a blast of J-Lo content that appears as though it was going for a ‘viral’ tactic but instead is getting lots of reaction for all the wrong reasons. TikTok is being flooded with copycat videos of “that one scene in j-lo’s movie”, taking the piss of the star pretending she preferred the days before she was rich and famous. While shaking her hair about she says, “I like taking my hair out like this. It reminds me of, like, when I was 16 in The Bronx running up and down the block.” The scene is wacko and ripe for being memed.

The pop star’s vapid words have been cut and pasted, pastiched and parodied beyond J-Lo’s worst nightmares. The general response to any self-glorifying documentary of this sort is generally shock. I can’t believe that a woman could be this vain and yet not have anyone in her entourage tell her, “some of this content might be a bad idea”. So, it’s been left up to the tens of thousands of clever TikTok critics to chop up and rearrange the madness in the pretend martyr’s mixed-up messaging. And every one of those TikTok clips makes more sense than any of J-Lo’s current content output (with more hits!).

I think what J-Lo has done is a very embarrassing thing for the star, but the scary thing is, I don’t think she’ll realise the real reactions her vanity fair-ride is receiving.

One thing that has come out of this media fuckuppery is the clear message that old-school vanity tactics have no place in the competitive and cunning new online age. They only make the star in question come across as superlatively delusional.

And J-Lo – who’s fairly fond of the odd nickname – better hope we don’t start calling her J-Lusional. That’ll ruin a lot of hard-earned cred for good ol’ Jenny from the Block.

This kind of vanity is being seen time and again from the old-school likes of Madonna (traipsing through mansions in regal garb as though she were a real monarch), Mariah Carey (pretending one of her fondest memories is when she used to sneak in bites of Ritz crackers from the pantry as a child), and of course J-Lo.

But with Jennifer Lopez, I’m guessing there’s a bigger reason for the tidal wave of futility she’s subjecting us to – a lot of which looks like having waited in the wings for the ‘right’ moment to be released: this shitstorm is sure to help detract viewers from her connection to Sean Diddy Combs aka Puff Daddy, who is in a lot of strife right now for alleged sex trafficking. Surely, while we’re all being subjected to the 2024 J-Lo Show, there’ll be little time left over to delve into the antics of the early-90s Puffy Empire of which J-Lo was front and centre.

Not so with some online creators who’ll have you wondering just how much of Diddy’s misdeeds did J-Lo know about? Add to this a slew of Insta reels and TikTok videos that criticise how J-Lo treats her staff and everyday people in restaurants and other public spaces, and it all makes for one giant media mess the gal’s going to have to work hard at cleaning up.

Antonino Tati