{"id":2079103,"date":"2025-10-09T09:49:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T09:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2079103"},"modified":"2025-10-09T09:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T09:49:10","slug":"jennifer-lopez-has-style-but-no-sting-in-kiss-of-the-spider-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/jennifer-lopez-has-style-but-no-sting-in-kiss-of-the-spider-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer Lopez has style but no sting in ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Though she plays its vampy femme fatale, Jennifer Lopez is constantly receding from \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman.\u201d The latest incarnation of Manuel Puig\u2019s 1976 novel places its two prison cellmates \u2014 Molina, an eccentric romantic, and Valent\u00edn, a pragmatic revolutionary \u2014 squarely at the erotic and emotional center. J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, which is just fine as the story goes, but not exactly a kinetic position for a star.<\/p>\n

The film written for the screen and directed by Bill Condon (\u201cGods and Monsters\u201d) is a hybrid adaptation of Puig\u2019s book and the 1992 musical it inspired, revered by Broadway fans for a dazzling and otherworldly performance by Chita Rivera<\/a>. The macabre warble of her voice and the wild jangling of her limbs are at least as memorable as any part of the show by Terrence McNally. (Puig also adapted his novel into a 1983 play<\/a>.) Rivera\u2019s distinctiveness is probably why it\u2019s one of the few musicals with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb (\u201cChicago<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCabaret<\/a>\u201d) that haven\u2019t seen a major revival.<\/p>\n

The Spider Woman is a beguiling villain with a kiss of death played by Aurora, Molina\u2019s screen idol. Onstage, Rivera lit up the abyss surrounding the cramped cell where her character was a figment of Molina\u2019s fantasy life. Here, as in the 1985 film adaptation, Molina adoringly recounts the plot of the Spider Woman movie to Valent\u00edn \u2014 who initially scoffs but quickly gets hooked \u2014 dividing the viewer\u2019s attention between their grim reality and Molina\u2019s favorite movie.<\/p>\n

Puig, who was born in Argentina in 1932, loved 1940s Hollywood films, calling them<\/a> \u201ctotally stylized \u2026 dreams\u201d that \u201callow you the possibility of a synthetic approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

That aptly describes Condon\u2019s treatment of the cinematic world where Lopez plays dual parts: the goth-glam Spider Woman and a magazine editor whose blond coif seems to be restyled with every scene. Unlike the shades-of-gray Argentine prison, the sequences are polished and color-rich, set on the sort of soundstages where dance numbers naturally unfurl in black tie. (Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler worked with Condon on \u201cDreamgirls\u201d and the live-action \u201cBeauty and the Beast.\u201d) In a conceit that\u2019s both sweet and practical, Diego Luna (who plays Valent\u00edn) and newcomer Tonatiuh (Molina) also appear in the film within the film.<\/p>\n

The high-contrast back-and-forth \u2014 between the inmates\u2019 budding intimacy and the increasingly cockamamie movie \u2014 feels disjointed and eventually grows tiresome. How does the peculiar plot relate to their deepening bond? Not enough to worry much about. Maybe it wouldn\u2019t feel like whiplash if Lopez were a more magnetic draw.<\/p>\n

Because Aurora is filtered through Molina\u2019s gaze, the ageless and pristine gloss that the \u201cHustlers\u201d star brings to her performance tracks well enough: She\u2019s honey-voiced and graceful like a celluloid siren. But that doesn\u2019t make her compelling to watch. Rather than singular and strange, she\u2019s blandly hyper-polished \u2014 proficient but without personality.<\/p>\n

Not so the inmates turned lovers, whose relationship is far more tenderly detailed than in the stage musical, with Condon drawing influence from the dialogue-driven novel. (A handful of songs, including those by the chorus of prisoners and between Molina and his doting mother, have been cut.) The dissolving of boundaries between the two culminates in an unlikely romance that\u2019s more captivating than the razzle-dazzle interruptions.<\/p>\n

As a fluttering Molina with wide and sometimes wild eyes, Tonatiuh is a revelation, lending the role a witty and wounded softness. Molina in previous iterations has been portrayed as a gay man (William Hurt won an Oscar in the part), but is more clearly understood here as a trans woman lacking the opportunity to transition. (\u201cAs for my friends and myself, we\u2019re a hundred percent female,\u201d Molina tells Valent\u00edn<\/a> in the book.) That the character lives in the blur between boundaries makes Tonatiuh\u2019s sensitive portrayal all the more extraordinary.<\/p>\n

Luna likewise does delicate work with Valent\u00edn, who decries sentimentality as weakness before slipping into his own deep well of feeling. The connection between the two men \u2014 which in every version of the story involves Molina spying on his cellmate to get parole \u2014 is a grounded slow burn. The film treats their kinship with a modern sensibility; in previous versions, their consummation has been queasy and forced.<\/p>\n

That alone is a great achievement for this \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman,\u201d in which jail seems more alive than the fanciful flights that are meant to escape it. If only the arachnid herself seemed at least a little deadly.<\/p>\n

R.<\/b> At area theaters. Contains language, sexual content and some violence. 128 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though she plays its vampy femme fatale, Jennifer Lopez is constantly receding from \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman.\u201d The latest incarnation of Manuel Puig\u2019s 1976 novel places its two prison cellmates \u2014 Molina, an eccentric romantic, and Valent\u00edn, a pragmatic revolutionary \u2014 squarely at the erotic and emotional center. J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2029532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[350223,390601,346336,22265,350483,390602,389447,366474],"class_list":["post-2079103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-bill-condon","tag-chita-rivera","tag-film-adaptation","tag-jennifer-lopez","tag-manuel-puig","tag-molina","tag-spider-woman","tag-valentin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/In-Black-Rabbit-Jason-Bateman-and-Jude-Law-are-brothers.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2079103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2079104,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079103\/revisions\/2079104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2029532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2079103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2079103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2079103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}