The Shunning

This will be remembered as The Day the Movies Broke

Jan 30, 2026

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Melania-the-movie has broken a record: No film protest, no entertainment boycott ever-in-the-world, has clocked such eviscerating results. Talk about white hot hatred.

I researched every film boycott and “bad review” in cinema history— there’s plenty— and it’s no contest. Box office poison has reinvented itself.

ETTD, indeed.1

The Slovenian Melania statue was burned down in 2020.

I’ve been a film critic for 40 years; I’ve been a “trophy-wife-watcher” all my life. This débâcle takes the cake.

The movie-boycott is no Streisand Effect — and no one is bankrolling an ineffectual protest. The American public hate the fuck out of this movie and it’s entirely organic.

Never has so much money been spent on something so entirely unseen. The Empress Has No Clothes. Never has a political bribe been packaged as a “documentary” — HA!

The First Lady’s bomb has opened new vistas for the Bobbi Flekmans’ of the world.

“You don’t find this offensive? You don’t find this disgusting?”

Yeah, we do, Bobbi. We really do. If, like Spinal Tap’s ill-fated album cover, Melania’s biography had portrayed a subjugated woman on a dog leash, it would have least been . . . Honest.

Negative publicity has always been Hollywood’s prerogative: “Star pregnant and strung out on heroin!”— yeah, it sells tickets.

But Amazon-MGM’s publicists and distributors have been stymied by this zombie— a film whose production which was designed to break the movie business, not play along.

Instead of publicizing the film the past week, Amazon instead sent out a letter announcing the layoff of thousands of employees, “As part of an effort to reduce bureaucracy and strengthen the organization.”

Ha! I guess that IS the Melania press release. There’s only a lonely A.I.-Roomba left to handle media inquiries.

Let’s turn to the labor behind the movie. No one wants to be associated with such trash who isn’t dignity-wraithed to Trump. That’s saying something for Tinseltown. People typically crawl on their hands and knees to get a “production credit” on a project, and instead, with this movie, they’re running screaming in the opposite direction. Amazing.

According to Rolling Stone, ⅔ of the workers on the set refused to allow their names to be mentioned in the final cut. They describe the making of the film as “chaos,” which is what happens when the majority of the budget is sent to the Trumps themselves.

Look at the IMDB listing: Only one person is listed in the Music Department, one person in Production, one Editor with no assistants. Hohoho. A 75-million dollar film with only a handful of workers listed below the line? Two are listed as “Crew” including a man who did “translation management.”

Was that because the film was better in the original Russian?

Melania’s extraordinary lack of interest in learning English over the decades is in part because she reviles immersion. Her indifference to this country (I dont care, do you?) is a marvel. But, to be fair, the teenage Ms. Knauss from Slovenia was pimped out to immigrate before she knew the meaning of the word NO. That is her life story. Perhaps her disinterest in “communicating” is stoic revenge, against her family, her “handlers” in the Eastern Bloc and Paris, the entire Russian Ops-Epstein-Elite-Model brothel machine that brings Soviet girls to the States for arranged cruelties— I mean, marriages.

Trump did this all before, but without Jeff Bezos. He is a creature of habit, and the Melania 2.0 duplication of his marriage to Ivana Trump is startling unless you understand his compulsions. With Donald, it’s always the same burger, the same tie, the same tits. That’s how he sees it. Marla Maples, bustline aside, was an aberration, the mistake he’s erased from the board.

With Ivana, and then Melania, Trump was professionally matched to a suitable wife through a series of financial transactions handled by Girlie-Brokers like Jeff Epstein. Donald is a man who has never been kissed without a payment, in his entire life.

Think about that.

Ivana was systematically groomed to get out of Czechoslovakia, her Communist Party-savvy family greasing the right palms. She knew she had to get to America to cash in. Melania’s Slovenian parents did the same. The ethos is: “You will fuck anyone and surgically change your body in any way demanded” to get your family out of this hellhole.”

This migration philosophy is the directive; Stepford Wives are the result. Which golf-course will your bones be unceremoniously dumped?

Melania is reportedly “furious” that the Minneapolis ICE state-murders are overshadowing her star turn. Who knows if it’s true?— her optics make Marie Antoinette look like Joan of Arc.

Movie-lovers are chortling over screenshots they share of “zero seats sold” at local theaters, movie chains who were paid by the Amazon to host the screening. The only people I know attending, are the handful of working movie critics who are “required,” and they’re outraged to pay the ticket price.

When BoxOfficePro says they expect the movie to yield “$5mm” in ticket receipts on opening weekend, I’d like to know how they expect to see so much as five dollars. They must be counting global sales, where Melania Trump is more of a kink curiosity. (She ain’t everyone’s First Lady).

Here in the States, where overall theater attendance is plummeting, the reluctant movie fan is not shelling out for something that turns their stomach and delivers not a shred of humor. Later, it will be cut up into YouTube clips. Melania will be a film that triumphs in BitTorrent.

Might it be fun to attend as a campy heckle-party and throw popcorn at the screen?”

Nope. This isn’t Rocky Horror or The Valley of Gwangi.

It’s not fun. There is nothing fun about this movie, about this regime, or about the situation Americans find ourselves. We are living, as Chuck D. said, in the Terrordome.

My documentary is this: Out of the screens and onto the streets. Until this regime falls, there will be no respite, there will be no rest and there will be no waking up without a shudder. Culture— including the culture of shunning and shaming— does mean something. Let’s make this matter.