MELANIA, THE MOVIE: THE REVIEWS ARE IN!!!!!!!!!!!
“MELANIA IS THE WORST MOVIE i’VE EVER SEEN”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/melania-movie-review
Last night, I left an empty chickpea can on my counter. When I came back 30 minutes later, small, black bugs had swarmed the tin and were crawling over my sink. I would rather relive that moment a hundred times over than have to watch another minute of the movie Melania.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/melania-trump-documentary-review/685829/
Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers. Melania Trump really doesn’t seem to care about the optics of launching her $75 million show reel while the country is in such profound crisis—that much she has always made clear. But most Americans do. And the particular details of the past week—the demonstrations and the tear gas in Minneapolis, the Melania ads covering the Sphere, the themed macarons at the White House, the scurrying-away of many who were professionally involved with this documentary—should be remembered long after the film itself is forgotten.
