Jennifer Lopez is back on top again, with a revitalized movie and music career, including a new album en route: This Is Me…Now, her first in nearly a decade. She’s had an up-and-down career, filled with big highs and low lows. One of the latter was also how she first met her current husband, Ben Affleck, whom she met on the set of a little movie from 2003 called Gigli. Gigli was not well-received. In fact, it was a notorious bomb and a punchline, making a pittance of its way-too-large budget. But it seems to have one fan: Jennifer Lopez.
As caught by Entertainment Weekly, Jenny from the Block did one of those epic Vanity Fair videos, where an off-screen interviewer hangs out with a celebrity, whom they pepper with one rapid-fire question after another. One of the 73 questions she’s asked is which of her films should get a sequel. She had a surprising one-word response: Gigli.
Gigli, for those not in the know, was a rom-com crime film in which Affleck plays Larry Gigli, a low-level mobster who is paired with a lesbian fixer played by Lopez to take care of a mentally-challenged young man (Justin Bartha). It’s kind of a weird movie. Despite Lopez’s character’s orientation, she succumbs to Gigli’s advances in a memorably miscalculated bit involving “turkey time” talk. It’s also 121 minutes long — an hour shorter, at least, than writer-directror Martin Brest’s previous film, the inexplicably epic Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt getting hit by a car and at one point speaking patois. (In Brest’s defense, he also made Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run, which alone gives him a liftetime pass.)
By picking Gigli for sequel status, maybe Lopez is joking. Maybe she has a sentimental attachment to it. Again, it’s where she met the man she dated for some time thereafter and wed some two decades later. It also severely hobbled her film career; she even had her role in the Kevin Smith rom-com Jersey Girl, in which she was again paired with Affleck, cut down to the nub. She probably has mixed feelings about the whole affair.
However, this isn’t the first time Lopez has stood up for one of her biggest flops. Back in 2015, she told Seth Meyers “there are worse films than Gigli.”
So, has time been kind to Gigli? Or is it flawed and Lopez simply wants to give it a Mulligan? Or should everyone instead watch another of her romantic crime films, Steven Soderbergh’s top shelf Out of Sight, in which she and George Clooney deliver arguably their finest hours?
If you’re curious, Gigli streams for rental. In the meantime, you can watch Lopez’s full VF chat below.
(Via EW)