Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
Kelly told them they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and forcing them to watch this movie sounds like a war crime.
Good god, this sounds like some shit they would do to those torturees at guantanamo, force them to watch this shit on repeat until they confess.
I shouldn’t make light of it we did some horrific torture at guantanamo, probably still do, popular music and movies is actually part of it, playing the same music on repeat, hot and cold temperature changes, stress positions, all sorts of disgusting shit, along with sexual abuse.
We stopped pretending to be a civilized country in 2001.
In the future, people will look back and think “OBL correctly assessed his target and struck a decisive victory.”
OBL?
Osama Bin Laden
Did the asswipes force the soldiers to pay an admission fee to watch the crap film? The drunk wife beater also wants the North Korean fake clapping and tears.
It does read like that. That various “superiors” were “encouraging” people to go see it in the theater. Pretty much the only way to inflate the numbers and avoid “military uses millions of dollars to buy tickets for a movie”.
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU ONLY MAKES YOU STRONGER
Morale will improve or you get the movie again!
… please clap…
Pathetic.
CLAP, GODDAMIT!
Clap! Thats an ORDAH!
I read this elsewhere and I thought it was satire.
Well, at least hopefully this will cause dissent in the army as they stop taking him seriously.
The more I watch the more I think of the propaganda songs Romania made about Elena Ceaușescu.
If they’re gonna do propaganda, why is it in the most pathetic way?
Shouldn’t it be a film about national pride or something like that?
I suspect that it’s a reaction to the various successful media projects by Michelle Obama. In Trump’s mind, the Obamas are making him look bad by being smart/successful/…, so this is Trump’s attempt at showing that his first lady too can create a successful media project. Because the Trumps are tasteless and have surrounded themselves with sycophants, there wasn’t anyone around to tell them how crap the movie was, so it got released as it is.
The big tell that this was Trump’s attempt at trying to one up the Obamas, is that once it became obvious that the Melania movie was bombing, Trump posted a super racist video about the Obamas. He tried to one up the Obamas creatively, failed, and then resorted to insults.
Meanwhile Melania is 28 million dollar richer, so as usual she probably doesn’t care that much about how bad this makes her look.
It’s not that they don’t know the movie is shit, it’s that they don’t care. They are happy juicing it to have good numbers even when everyone hates it. Just as the president is happy having his name on something where all the people in it hate him, he’s happy having a nobel peace prize on his mantle that was given to someone else.
He’s just a pathetic man, and can’t or won’t hide it in his old age as he loses control of his faculties and the party leads him around by the hand to dismantle his America First Legacy and the like. Talk about Sad.
Because it works. Most of Trumps propaganda is pathetic, but it still works doesn’t it. Still in power, escalating more and more.
Maybe it could be about the triumph of the will? That might be nice.
Or they could write a book about their struggle.
Why didn’t they save this for the political prisoners they need to torture?
Psssst. We’re all political prisoners here now.
They did and are. Why do you think they are making the military watch it.
Like a cross between “A Clockwork Orange” and “Full Metal Jacket”.
“ARE YOU ENJOYING THIS BIOPIC OF THE FIRST LADY, PYLE!?”
The mandatory cinema consumption featuring great leader’s family will continue until morale improves.
Some of her other works might be better suited for improving morale
Meh.
Agree, hard pass.
Lol thats not a $75M film. That’s an $82M film because that 7 million in sales was also spent by the same people who made it.
Its actually a 50M film with a 25M advertising budget… They haven’t even made their advertising expenses back. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out 75% of ticket sales were bought with the ad budget. I never saw an ad for it.
It’s the enemy military right? It’s torture right?
“Against their will” sounds funny in context. I was forced to do plenty of things in the military against my will. Most dealing with PowerPoint presentations.
Sounds like any other corporate job, except you don’t have the fun of literally murdering your competition.
Isn’t the point of joining the military is to surrender free will? That’s one of the many reasons I didn’t want to.
In war, mostly yes. But the majority of the time, they only control your work hours. There’s a ton of caveats to that but day to day, it’s like any other job. But they cannot make you spend money on something like this. I don’t know if I could have not laughed in their face for trying to pressure that.
*This varies more or less depending on the branch.
But could they buy the tickets themselves and order you to go to the cinema during work hours?
They’re all asleep at the Melania movie! Now is our chance to invade!" – The Entire Massed Russian/Chinese/North Korean Army
Maybe they play this on ships and force the crew to watch?
Nah, too many sailors would jump over the rails.
They could and you’d have to go.
More taxpayer money wasted by this Republican administration and Republican Congress that can’t do their jobs to do appropriate oversight.
Seems like we are at war.
The ironic thing is that if it was a real documentary, talking for example how they met, how she got citizenship, her involvement in his businesses etc then a lot of people would watch it. Heck, I don’t care about movies about first lady, but I would watch it.
It’s just for some reason they want to keep so far away from those topics they n made it about the 20 days before second inauguration.
Maybe they’ll be mad enough to disregard illegal orders next time they’re ordered to do something illegal.
