Black Cakes and Branded Buckets: Welcome to the Premiere of Brett Ratner’s Melania | Melania Trump

This week sees the release of Melania, Amazon’s official feature documentary about Melania Trump. Melania is directed by Brett Ratner, and has a production budget of $40 million. Obviously, you probably won’t watch it.

Of course you are not. Days after the murder of Alex Peretti by a US Border Patrol agent, a trashy, licensed project about the current wife of an unpopular world political leader – run by a man accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and whose production and release smacked of corporate media shame – seems like the least attractive prospect ever. But hey, any excuse to have a party, right?

On Saturday, a special screening for Melania was held at the White House, in a temporary movie theater that had to be built due to ongoing construction work in the White House auditorium. The event was attended by what The Hollywood Reporter described as “70 diverse VIPs,” including Amazon’s Andy Jassy, ​​Apple’s Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Mike Tyson. Amazon has allocated a $35 million marketing budget for Melania, some of which can be seen in the show airing on Saturday. If the photos from the event are any indication, there should be plenty of them left.

Guests reportedly left the show carrying Melania merchandise, which included framed Melania show tickets, black-and-white cookies bearing Melania’s name, a limited edition Melania book, Melania, and black-and-white Melania souvenir popcorn boxes. Additionally, based on photos of the event, snacks included black-and-white M&Ms, black-and-white chocolate-covered pretzels, black-and-white macarons, and a center display of white cake pops. In other words, this is exactly what you’ll find at a baby shower for someone with debilitating color blindness.

Another nice fact about the show is that upon arrival, guests were treated to a full military band playing the Melania Waltz, the main musical theme of the documentary, as written by the film’s composer, Tony Nyman. Obviously, the vast majority of us don’t know what a Melania waltz sounds like, but Nyman’s IMDb page lists his work as including eight episodes of Top Chef and the 2020 3D Russian superhero space opera Cosmoball (“A huge spaceship hovering above the Earth – this is a stadium that hosts sporting events similar to soccer but at dizzying speeds. The name of the game is cosmoball”) so it’s probably going to be pretty exciting.

More will follow. On Thursday, the day before the film’s release, Melania will make her official premiere at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Center and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

Details are still being kept under wraps, but it will be interesting to see how much a big event like this can enhance the monochromatic look created by the White House show. Will there be a black carpet? Will the popcorn be black? Will someone be able to extract and dye Melania’s terrifying red Christmas trees from 2018, so that the entire place resembles a nightmarish 1920s German Expressionist forest? We are waiting impatiently.

In fact, if you’re able to stare hard enough to detach yourself from the horrors of it all, there’s something beautiful about this release. Melania clearly hopes her documentary will be a “Sex and the City”-style cultural phenomenon, a brand of luxury and chic that all the girls can enjoy together. Obviously, that’s a pretty hard thing to pull off when you’ve convinced a disloyal media company to fund a $40 million ego massage during a turning point of global insecurity largely instigated by your husband, but you can’t blame a woman for trying.

Then again, in reality, you’ll probably end up skipping Melania to watch something less depressing, like Die My Love or a documentary about asbestos inhalation. However, lucky attendees of the White House show will get to keep the merchandise they received on Saturday. Granted, a framed and numbered movie ticket might not have much value right now. But 50 years from now, any number of annoying niche collectors will be willing to pay top dollar for it on the dark web. Just be sure to keep it in a safe place, to prevent it from being destroyed during the next Civil War riot.