Tribeca Opening Night Review: Jennifer Lopez Documentary ‘Part Time’

“It takes a while to warm up to me,” Jennifer Lopez says in a wonderful conversation with a group of stoic dancers she’s been with for a few months. The same goes for the Amanda Mitchell documentary. Ნ part timeIt’s a sparse and largely mundane portrait of the actor-singer that captures enough candid moments to be more than publicity.

From the start, it seems like JLo is embarking on an urgently losing battle due to the time frame she’s dealing with, which was the focus of her halftime show with Shakira at the 2020 Super Bowl in Miami, now seems so far away. The final days of Covid, Black Lives Matter, and the Donald Trump presidency (not to mention this year’s show with Dr. Dress, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and Mary J. Blige). However, those who stand out are right, arguing that Lopez’s desire for a gorgeous arrangement for a Latin celebratory girl isn’t just warm weather.

Making its world premiere as the opening night film of the Tribeca Festival, Michelle’s documentary opens with narrative confusion, counting down to the Super Bowl show in July 2019, while simultaneously tracing Lopez’s strange journey. After awards season. . Lorraine Scafaria premiered at Toronto Film Festival patients In September of the same year. An early attempt to engage Lopez with an empty but happy childhood looks incredible – Clip sweet charity The song “There Must Be Something Better Than This” and she left the family home in the dull gray of the Bronx at just 18 years old. Luckily, Michelle later returns with her family for an ungrateful, if not completely filling, Thanksgiving meal. Any flaw shows the tension that arises when an aspiring mother instills the same values ​​in her daughter.

There’s a lot of Jennifer Lopeze in the movie because its subject matter sincerely embraces its diversity, often referring to her musical character (JLo) in third person. Music and dance seem to be her focus and passion, and she seems to have forgotten about her acting career before. patients With it, it brought the sound of well-deserved awards sweeping the Oscars, as we see here (obviously ironic, Ნ part time Meet Netflix, who sponsored Lopez Dern’s winner that year: Laura Dern marriage story). A real, mostly stone-faced Lopez cries a few times in the movie, especially when reading a brilliant review of her performance. patientsBut he rarely laughs, and it’s tempting to wonder if the biggest thing missing from his impressive armor is a sense of humor. One short montage reminds us of its heyday as the headline of the supermarket food tabloid (defender Ben Affleck gives us the only testimony that has passed through Lopez’s friends gallery), while another highlights it’s toxic mix of ordinary racism and sexism. Three. Your curves. Surprisingly, like the pop and movie star, Lopez is happy to be perceived as a working mom when her teenage daughter is suddenly in her mother’s company.

All this information hinders what López is building: a show that denies the Trump administration’s inhuman treatment of Latinos, where swarms of girls coming out of symbolic cages sing the 1999 song “Let’s Get Loud.” If we didn’t know how he fell, the pinnacle of stars and stripes, the Puerto Rican flag, and “Born in the USA,” Bruce Springsteen might have been the recipe for a disaster in spinal tap rates, but somehow these hurt. Led by a restless Lopez, it worked for 14 minutes. But the strange thing is, after that comes some exciting and rather clumsy code that goes to America every year without Trump and is now dominated by Covid (Mrs Lopez’s face mask is naturally silky white). When he sings “This Land is Your Land” for Joe Biden’s opening, he invites us to reflect on Lopez’s philanthropic achievements, and after a modest buffet of biographical details, the sudden proliferation of new information, like the force-feeding of raw vegetables. .

However, sophistication has never been JLo’s strength, and although Ნ part time It won’t win new fans or any awards, it will win like Taylor Swift’s 2020 movie i miss americanShow that sometimes even the most controlled documentary can only tell the truth.