” … two hours of Melania feels like pure, endless hell.”
By Marc C. Johnson
John Kennedy famously told a news conference in Paris on June 2, 1961:
Mr. Secretary of State, Ambassador Alphand, Ambassador Sonnet, Ambassador Gavin, M. Redmond, ladies and gentlemen:
I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.
It’s impossible to imagine the current president saying something like that about the current First Lady.So, rather than the class, humor and self deprecation of JFK we endure a fake “documentary” of our vacuous immigrant First Lady.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who owns the Washington Post and gutted its editorial page to seek favor with our Authoritarian-in-Chief, made Melania Trump a movie. Or more correctly the Amazon billionaire paid a bribe to Donny Grifter in the form of a $40 million payment to Trump’s wife. Sorry, $40 million to her “production company.” It ain’t classy, but it is corruption. Imagine an Obama or a Kennedy doing something like that … oh, never mind. The shameless “elites” around Donny Moneybags play by different rules, or better yet have no rules. The end product – Melania, a 1 hour, 48 minute “documentary” – totally predictably, became an instant sham, a farce, a film so utterly devoid of purpose or importance that it will join Trump University, Trump Steaks, Air Trump, the failed casino, the phoney gold sneakers, the crypto coins and all the rest as a mark of the neediness and greediness of our American Mussolini. Many people who worked on the film reportedly refused to have their names in the credits. It’s such a farce that we need to laugh out loud at the absurdity that this happened in the United States of America. So, here goes. Commence the laughter.
The one great thing about perfectly horrible film making are the brilliant takedowns of the squalid awfulness. Here’s a sample. From the review in Variety: Made for an outrageously high budget ($40 million, plus $35 million spent on marketing), with a director who’d effectively been canceled over accusations of sexual abuse and was in no position to do anything but what he was told (that is, to be directed), the film, in its junk-streaming prefab-day-in-the-life reality-show way, mirrors the control of the Trump administration. Its very existence is a pure expression of that control. By the time “Melania” arrives at the Inaugural festivities, the film has given itself over to a series of rituals (the candlelight dinner, the Inaugural itself, the luncheon, the Starlight Ball), which feels weirdly fitting since the filmmaking itself is so ritualized. It never lets the air of experience in. And that should tell you something. “Melania,” like the Trump regime, is a designed-from-the-top-down reality show that’s devoted to shutting reality out.
And that was one of the nicer reviews,
Nick Hilton reviewed for The Independent: The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad. It will exist as a striking artefact – like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly. Organising plans for his return to the White House at 2am, after the Starlight Ball, Trump announces he will immediately “begin straightening out the nation.” “We’re all very grateful,” his event producer whimpers sycophantically. It is a visceral moment where audiences, around the world, will begin to taste the boot that the American establishment so blithely licks.
And here’s Natasha Jokic in Buzzfeed: The “documentary” is shot with the style of a music video, or perhaps a screensaver. The titular woman spends the entire movie talking in vague statements, the kind you’d expect from an absent father using ChatGPT to write a wedding speech.
Jokic wrote that she would rather relive 100 times over a mishap were little black bugs attacked an empty chickpea can she left on the kitchen counter than to watch one minute of Melania. So there. Xan Brooks in The Guardian wrote: No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.
The Guardian gave Melania one star, presumably because the projector didn’t shutdown during the screening. Frank Schenk in The Hollywood Reporter: To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it. Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon.
Kevin Fallon in The Daily Beast went to a theater to review the film hoping to score an “I survived the Melania Movie” t-shirt. He was disappointed: I don’t want to blow anyone’s minds here or throw you off your balance when I inform you that the Melania documentary, now in theaters, is terrible. Were it not for scattered laughter-inducing scenes—most of which, I would gather, were not intentionally humorous—I would rule it an abomination. For my $20 ticket (robbery!) and a misery-inducing walk to the theater in the bone-chilling cold, if not a t-shirt, I got some chuckles in return. And, I guess, a war story. Of course, everyone knew the film, directed for an obscene amount of money by notorious sex pest Brett Ratner, was going to be bad. It’s the specific kind of bad I was on a fact-finding mission for.
Melania is a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review; it’s so expected and utterly pointless.
“Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” she says at the top, teasing that cameras will follow her for the 20 days leading up to the inauguration, revealing her “transition from private citizen to first lady…again.”
Adam Gabbatt wrote about the film and it’s scant opening day audience for The Guardian: At the beginning of her new documentary, Melania Trump tells the viewer that “everybody wants to know” how she spends her time.
“So here it is,” she says. “Twenty days in my life.”
It’s a snappy introductory line, but, unfortunately for the first lady, it appears to be wrong. All available evidence suggests that, actually, very few people want to know about Melania Trump.
At one of New York’s busiest movie theaters on Friday, the day of Melania’s release, the crowd was sparse, and the poor turnout for Melania Trump’s vanity project, commissioned by Amazon founder and Donald Trump-friend Jeff Bezos, was reflected across the country, with executives forced to downplay predictions for the movie’s opening weekend.
The Guardian reporter, in all fairness, did find a couple of people who seemed generally interested in the unknown side of our First Lady. One was a self-described Democrat, Jim Behrle:Behrle said he watched Melania in part because he has a monthly pass to the theater which allows him to watch as many movies as he likes for $29. Despite being surprised by how little he disliked the movie, he is unlikely to recommend it to friends and family.
“It’s not a gripping film,” he said.
The times we live in, The Melania movie hit theaters as Donald Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls that would presumably be defended by the Justice Department, an agency he controls, for $10 billion dollars because someone leaked his tax returns that he once promised to release but never did. The savage reviews were hitting just as Trump’s private law firm – the U.S. Justice Department – released more, but not anywhere near all, of the Epstein Files. Some poor DOJ attorney failed to redact the thousands of times Trump is mentioned. This bomb of a film dropped at the same time the U.S. government ordered the arrest of journalists for covering news in Minnesota, while Bruce Springsteen’s protest song – “Streets of Minneapolis” – reached #1 on the Billboard top 100, and while massive protests continued against ICE in Minnesota and across the country, and while Donald Trump said Barack Obama should be arrested for something, something, blah, blah, something. In a serious country where laws, basic decency and minimum standards of personal character still count for something, this bribe of a film would never have been made since the very idea of paying a First Lady an outlandish sum for a piece of junk would have been, well, unthinkable. Laughable. Unethical. Unseemly. Corrupt. Stupid. We are not that country. Jeff Bezos should be shamed and ashamed, but a lot of money shields a lot of truly disgusting behavior apparently. And Donald Trump and his vapid wife have no shame, so there is that. Collectively, however, we the people should be ashamed and maybe more of us are.
 |
Survey says: The Pew survey finds that 60% of Americans have concerns about Trump’s ethics. You don’t say …The Republican Party charade goes on, however, as Congressional leaders of the party cling to the 21% of Americans who have “extremely or very high confidence” in Trumpian ethics. In addition to GOP members of Congress and Trump’s Cabinet, this group includes Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Mr. Ed, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and Vladimir Putin. These people also believe the moon landing was faked, the 2020 election was stolen and Donny the Developer still possesses a full deck. The guest list for the premiere at, ehem, the Kennedy Center was a who’s who of the 21%, a collection of slippery, incompetent, grasping people who are “famous” for being just that. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House (kind of) was there. The Secretary of the Interior, a former North Dakota governor, was there (you wonder how Melania the Movie will play in Fargo.) The U.S. attorney for the D.C. district was there, but left her wine box at home (we assume.) A few “influencers” attended. Robert Kraft, the sleazy NFL owner, was there. Well, of course he was. Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t able to make it. But to be sure the 21% hangs together.
Slovenian Sphinx Flick Nixed! The only thing more predictable than the limpid dreadfulness of this entire business is that Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, gets the last word. She and her son, Barron, do not want to get out of the limo during the inaugural parade, and she keens about political violence, again without acknowledging that her husband has been provoking violence since he and Melania rode down his golden escalator.
She has a warm chat about her immigrant roots with a designer who is an immigrant from Laos, ignoring that her husband has torn America apart by denigrating immigrants and unleashing a rabid force of ICE agents on American cities. (Now, Trump has restricted visas from 75 countries, including Laos.)
Melania, the movie star, lives up to the message on the infamous jacket she wore to a migrant child detention center: “I really don’t care. Do U?” It turns out she does care — for herself.
In a serious country …Oh, never mind.