Having gone viral lately for all the wrong reasons, Amazon and Jennifer Lopez recently released a documentary meant to chronicle the making of Jennifer Lopez’s cinematic iteration of her new music album “This is Me…Now: A Love Story.” “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” is filled with staged scenes, obviously scripted “candid” moments, and a ton of promotion of the new album and album tracks.
It does a great job promoting the new album and works double time in JLO’s efforts to rebrand herself as a “self-made” simple girl from the Bronx, a pigeonhole she’s evaded for years. Suffice to say that documentary is filled with silliness and absurdity. This is only a few of those moments.
“The Greatest Love Story Never Told” is now Streaming on Amazon Prime.
JLO Exposes Ben Affleck, unapologetically.
In a proud admission, JLO explains that she showed everyone on her crew and entourage a book she compiled of pictures and their very personal correspondence e-mails and letters with Affleck before they re-united. Without his permission. Awk-ward. She explained she’d leave the book out in the open for anyone to draw inspiration from, and that they all nicknamed him (ugh) “Pen” Affleck. Affleck looks horribly embarrassed explaining this to the audience, but he seems to let a lot roll off his back for a duration of the time that he’s on screen.
Mud
In one of the more notorious moments of sheer baffling banality, JLO visualizes dancing in mud with a background group of dancers and then asks her director “How muddy can the mud be?” His blank grin in response is all we need. Cut to a shot of one of her entourage proudly proclaiming: “The price of mud is finna go up after this!”
No One Wants to Be In Her Movie
JLO invites all of her friends for small roles, and she’s turned down by pretty much everyone. You can’t convince me it didn’t take a few weeks for her to convince Ben Affleck to appear in the documentary despite his protests. Folks like Ariana Grande, Snoop Dogg, Taylor Swift, Jason Momoa, Khloe Kardashian, Jennifer Coolidge, Lizzo, Anthony Ramos, and even Vanessa Hudgens all pretty much said “No Thanks.”
However, in the end in spite of her insistence she does convince third stringers like Derek Hough, Jennifer Lewis, rapper Fat Joe, Keke Palmer, Trevor Noah, and Sofia Vergara. She also literally begs Jane Fonda to film a short scene for her. Fonda of course is much too nice to turn her down, but she at least spends the entire time mocking the movie and chastising JLO. JLO of course takes it with a hearty laugh because: You don’t disrespect Jane Fonda, and JLO needs Fonda more than Fonda needs her. She tells herself on camera that she was collectively turned down because “they’re scared.” Sure, that’s what it is.
JLO props herself up as inventing “The Visual Album”
It’s not a musical, not a movie, and certainly not a music video, but a visual album. This is something all of JLO’s people pretend is some unique vision–considering Michael Jackson did it first with “Thriller,” Pink Floyd did it with “The Wall,” Daft Punk did it with “Interstella 5555,” hell, R. Kelly did it with “Trapped in the Closet.”
And heaven forbid you call it a “music video.” The director openly scolds a crew member for referring to “This is Me… Now: A Love Story” as a “Music video.”
JLO Literally has Nothing to Say
Considering JLO is a Latina from the Bronx who you argue earned her way in to superstar status, she really has nothing interesting to say. At no point in “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” does she ever give us deeper insight in to her life. It’s mainly just her complaining about being in a lot of relationships with men, and re-uniting with Ben Affleck. She tells the same stories and vague scripted monologues about her project over and over, but never actually says anything. She sounds so much like a press release, and less like an actual sincere human being.