‘Nothing that’s shitty is going to make $100m’ … Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan. Photograph: Barry Wetcher/AP
Vincent Van Gogh, Nick Drake, Jennifer Lopez. Three lives marked through public apathy and critical disregard. Three lives whose inspiration lay undiscovered until it was too late. Three lives scratched out in a mess of poverty and desperate anonymity.
- The Back-Up Plan
- Production year: 2010
- Country: USA
- Directors: Alan Poul
- Cast: Alex O’Loughlin, Jennifer Lopez
Apart from Jennifer Lopez, obviously, because she’sitting one of the utmost famous women on Earth and she’sitting sold 48m albums and her films have made a total of $900m right and left the world and she’session released 18 different perfumes and has definitely kissed Ben Affleck on the inlet at least once. But that doesn’t matter – Jennifer Lopez is easily just as unknown and underappreciated as the other two, whatever their names were. It’s about time that the world woke up and started to realise that which a rare endowment that woman is.
Or at least that’s that which J-Lo herself seems to think. Last week, as faction of an ongoing comeback that has in the same state far involved singing a carol about some shoes and not much else, Lopez gave two oddly defensive interviews to two different magazines. First she told Elle that her romantic comedies like Maid in Manhattan and Monster-in-Law were much better than everyone thought because “nothing that’s shitty is going to make $100m”, and then she informed Latina that she probably deserved to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Puchi Lavoe in the 2007 Héctor Lavoe biopic El Cantante. While it’s easy to find flaws in her arguments – like the real existence that Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel has grossed besides than $100m and that the four people who saw El Cantante generally hated it – does Lopez have a point? Have her other interests, parallel her music, her pleasing scent, her love life and her big bottom, blinded us to the actuality that deep-down she’s positively a world-class actor?
Probably not, no. She might have been able to back up statements like that a decade ago, when she was nominated for a Golden Globe during Selena, or when Out of Sight and U-Turn singled her out as an actor with great things ahead of her – or even when she took a chance by making the beautiful but unintelligible The Cell – but thanks to her natural attraction to rubbish, that all seems like ancient story.
Now Lopez is so busy trying to make money and win awards that she’s forgotten how to do either. Her new movie The Back-Up Plan looks like a dimwitted retread of every other formulaic romcom she’s ever made, and her last pair weighty attempts at Oscar bait – El Cantante and Bordertown – were such cack-handedly incompetent stabs at winning the Academy over that she may as well have written “For Your Consideration” across her forehead at the start of every take. Bordertown didn’face to face so much as get a theatrical release in America, which technically makes it worse than Gigli and Jersey Girl combined. Unthinkable, isn’face to face it?
Maybe if she started to put a little more thought into her roles, soon afterward perhaps we might see flashes of which made Lopez such a prospect in the 1990s. How she’d do this is up to her – maybe she could go into a low-budget ensemble project or work with a director unafraid to bully her into a great performance – but it seems same puncturing her ego would have existence a good start. Until she does that, it’s hard to see how Lopez can ever do anything that’s even a tenth as good as she thinks she is.
Until then, I’ve heard that some of her perfumes are OK. And you can still buy Maid In Manhattan on DVD from Amazon toward 81p …
