8 Things We Learned About Jennifer Lopez From Her New Documentary
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Jennifer Lopez's new Netflix documentary Halftime premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8, 2022. Directed by Amanda Micheli, the 95-minute documentary shows Jennifer Lopez "reflecting on her multifaceted career and the pressure of life in the spotlight."
Here are the eight things I learned about J.Lo from the documentary.
1.J.Lo wasn't very happy about splitting the Super Bowl show with Shakira.
Jennifer Lopez and Shakira evenly split their 14-minute halftime performance at the Superbowl 2020. While JLo admits that she was honored and excited to perform on a national stage with Shakira, behind the scenes she was seen extremely frustrated about the time constraints. In a phone call with Shakira, J.Lo said, "If it was going to be a double headliner, they should have given us 20 minutes. That's what they should've f***ing done." She also says that getting two people to do the Superbowl was "the worst idea in the world."
2.The NFL higher-ups wanted to cut out the "children in cages" part of J.Lo's show.
A day before the Superbowl, after the NFL officials got to see the performance for the first time, they wanted J.Lo to cut out the part where little girls came on to the stage in cages. This detail was devised as a part of the performance to show J.Lo's dissent against laws that stripped immigrants of basic human rights. J.Lo was not ready to do this. She stood her ground and asserted her creative freedom. "To take out the cages and sacrifice what I believe in would be like not being there at all. The Super Bowl is tomorrow and we're not changing anything," she explained.
3.J.Lo was motivated to be more political after seeing the images of children in cages on the border.
Jennifer Lopez says that she is not "political." But she couldn't be apolitical after she saw the images of kids in cages on the borders. "I’m not that person," she says. "But I was living in a United States I didn't recognize. I was afraid for my kids, for their future." "You don’t rip a child from their parents," she says. "There are just certain things as a human being you don’t do. It made me realize that I had a responsibility to not be quiet," she adds. "To not just leave the politics to everybody else."
4.J.Lo had considered quitting Hollywood at one point when she couldn't take any more jokes made at the expense of her relationship with Ben Affleck.
Jennifer Lopez says that there was a time when she had really "low self-esteem" despite her career blowing up. The documentary features a couple of clips of late-night shows and cartoons mocking J.Lo, mainly about her relationship with Ben Affleck. "No matter what I achieved," she says in the documentary. "Their [the media's] appetite to cover my personal life overshadowed everything." J.Lo and Ben Affleck were a power couple in Hollywood in the early 2000s. Popularly called "Bennifer," the couple called off their engagement in 2002. They announced their engagement in 2022.
"I said to her once, doesn't this [the media jabs] bother you?" Affleck says in the documentary. "And she said, I'm Latina, I expected this. You just don't expect it, you expect to be treated fairly." These comments affected J.Lo badly. She says, "There were many times where I was, like, I think I'm just going to quit. I had to really figure out who I was and believe in that and not believe anything else."
5.J.Lo was mocked by Hollywood media for her curves.
The documentary shows a series of clips of people in Hollywood mocking J.Lo's butt in segments that were aired on television. "When I started working, the beauty ideal was very thin, blonde, tall, not a lot of curves," she says. "It was hard when you think people think you're a joke. Like you're a punchline. But I wound up affecting things in a way that I never intended to affect them."
6.The Hustlers Oscar nomination snub and losing the Golden Globes hit J.Lo hard.
The documentary starts with clips from behind the scenes of J.Lo's recent critically acclaimed movie, Hustlers. The hard work that went behind the making of the movie is highlighted throughout the documentary. "It's super painful because it is like a crash course," she says in the documentary, pointing to bruises on her legs from taking pole dance lessons.
She says that she was excited about the movie because it "has substance." "That's something I fought for in my career," she says. "This is a film about women who had limited options and had to make hard choices. These characters remind me of women I knew growing up in the Bronx."
J.Lo received a Golden Globes nomination for the movie after 20 years of being an actor. Despite being the top runner for the award, she did not win. "I really thought I had a chance; I felt like I let everybody down," she says reflecting on the loss. The run-up to the Oscars is also featured in the documentary. Despite overwhelmingly positive reviews, Hustlers did not receive a single Oscar nomination.
"The truth is I really started to think I was going to get nominated," she says in the documentary. "I got my hopes up because so many people were telling me I would be. And then it didn't happen. I had to ask myself, what does that mean? I do this not for an award. I do this to tell stories and to affect change and to connect with people and make them feel things because I want to feel something. That's why I do it," she says.
7.Green is J.Lo's lucky color.
While getting ready for the 2020 Golden Globes, where J.Lo had been nominated for Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, she is seen telling her team that they are gonna need all the green in the world.
8.And finally, Google Image Search was inspired by the iconic Versace dress J.Lo rocked at the 2000 Grammy Awards.
According to Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, it was the low-cut green dress J.Lo rocked at the 2000 Grammy Awards that inspired Google engineers to invent image search on the site. The public's desire for non-text searches "first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world's attention," Schmidt shared on Project Syndicate. "At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: J.Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born."
