Ben Affleck reassures wife Jennifer Lopez that This Is Me... Now doesn’t ‘suck’
Ben Affleck reassures his wife Jennifer Lopez that her new film doesn’t “suck” in the singer’s recently-released documentary.
The Greatest Love Story Never Told arrived on Prime Video on Tuesday (27 February) and follows Lopez “as she attempts her most daring project yet: independently producing a new album and cinematic original that explore her twenty-year journey to self-love”.
In the documentary, Lopez is seen expressing doubt over the cinematic original, titled This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, which was released on 16 February in tandem with the artist’s new album of the same name.
“I had good intentions with this, I just don’t want to suck,” Lopez tells Affleck, to which he replies: “You know you’re scared.”
The “Jenny from the Block” singer then says she’s scared “it’s gonna f***ing suck a f***ing dick.”
“You’ll be scared it’ll suck until it doesn’t,” the Gone Girl star reassures his wife. “You’ve gotta discern between things that suck DNA-wise, and things that just don’t work right.”
“Right now it just sucks,” she declares before Affleck once again tells her it doesn’t “suck”.
“That’s wrong. That’s just inexperience, that you haven’t done this process before,” he tells the Grammy-nominated musician.
Lopez then teases Affleck: “I’m sorry that I’m not an award-winning director. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I wasn’t doing all the things at 21 years old.”
This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, the film, has largely been derided by critics and viewers.
Wesley Morris wrote for The New York Times: “Nobody who winds up at a ‘what’s the strangest moment in this new J Lo thingy’ contest should worry. There are no wrong answers.
“The parts in which Fat Joe plays Dr Melfi to Jennifer Lopez’s Tony Soprano bewilder as intensely as the too-many scenes in which Jane Fonda, Trevor Noah, Keke Palmer, Post Malone, Kim Petras and Neil deGrasse Tyson (to pick merely six of a dozen names) bickeringly represent the astrological signs. None of these people appears to have been on the set at the same time.”
The album seems to have been received more positively, with Helen Brown writing in her three-star review for The Independent: “This is Me... Now doubles down on Lopez’s previous commitment to celebrating her and Affleck’s (re)union in song.
“She clearly feels they are now old and wise enough to handle the public attention she claims contributed to their first breakup. There’s nothing to match the witty hook or insatiability of ‘Can’t Get Enough’, but cowbell-toting banger ‘Hearts and Flowers’ will keep you on the dancefloor.”
17 years after they first split up due to “excessive media attention”, Lopez and Affleck rekindled their relationship in 2021 and got married in 2022.
“We didn’t break up right at that moment,” Lopez recalled of ending her engagement with the actor almost two decased ago. “It happened over the series of the next few months.”
“I knew in my heart that I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life – I knew that,” she continued. “But it didn’t feel like we were going to make it.”
This is Me... Now is out now on Amazon Prime Video.