Melania Soars Despite Unprecedented Left-Wing Attack
I am not a film critic, and I have not yet seen Melania. I am a filmmaker. I have seen the trailer and director Brett Ratner’s earlier work, I’ve read the reviews, and I’m watching its data unfold on movie-related sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, the Internet Movie Database. The numbers show that the left has unleashed a massive attack on the first lady’s film — the most successful documentary in the last 10 years — but that attack is failing because Americans are hungry for entertaining content consistent with their values. In short, people are getting wise to the left’s coordinated media machine and its tactics.
Let’s review the evidence. On Rotten Tomatoes, Melania currently has a 6 percent critics score and a 99 percent audience score. People looking for entertainment rather than woke pablum now know to seek out movies with a higher audience score than critics’ score, and the larger the difference, the better. The highly successful Sound of Freedom carries a 58/99. (RELATED: How Are the Mighty Fallen: The End of Europe and Hollywood)
Melania is a professionally-made documentary that follows the first lady as she discharges her duties in our era. That was Brett Ratner’s goal, and while such a film was never going to appeal to Mrs. Trump’s haters, there are many people who do want to see a movie depicting what it’s like to be the first lady. It’s obviously not a low-budget mess made by incompetents deserving of a 1 out of 10. And yet this movie currently has a 1.3 out of 10 viewer rating on the Internet Movie Database. This is a score you’d usually find on a horror movie made in a weekend by aspiring film students.
Interestingly, there’s also a Moviemeter number, which measures how much popular interest there is in a movie or TV show. Marty Supreme is currently #17, Melania is #1. It’s no mystery why the left is going to war against the film.
In the past, faith-based films and politically conservative films were often not very good. … Those days are over.
If you dive deeper into the 1.3 viewer rating, you currently find 30,000 ratings of 1 out of 10 and 3,200 ratings of 10 out of 10, with precious little in between. That is an inverse bell curve and an obvious indicator of unnatural distribution and data manipulation. I learned about that personally on my recent film, Guns & Moses, a mystery thriller with a pro-Second Amendment, pro-faith perspective about a Hasidic rabbi who fights back when his community is attacked.
Guns & Moses has a 73/93 on Rotten Tomatoes and an inverted bell curve on IMDb, with three times as many 10’s as 1’s and little in between. Our unweighted mean is 6.8, and that is the score that should show up on streaming platforms that display the IMDb viewer rating, like Amazon Prime. Instead, what’s shown is a 5.3 weighted mean. How do they “weigh” the scores? No one knows because it’s a proprietary system. That same system lowered the Melania score from 2.0 unweighted to the 1.3 mentioned above. In other words, the IMDb system feels that the 3,200 user-10’s need to be discounted, but the 30,000 user-1’s do not.
Somehow, this weighting system always seems to hurt non-left-wing projects. Another example is the outstanding mini-series Red Alert, which chronicles four stories of Israelis under attack on October 7, where we find the inverted bell curve again, this time composed of five times as many 10’s as 1’s, leading to an unweighted mean of 8.4 and an IMDb weighted mean of 6.9. (RELATED: The Fall and Rise of American Culture)
Such numbers are further manipulated and depressed for conservatively-oriented entertainment by a breathless leftist media that 1) publishes critic reviews in uniform lockstep on their talking points — a tactic familiar to anyone who has noted the parrot-like nightly attacks on conservative politicians in the legacy media — and 2) incites the public to hate and low-rate conservative content they haven’t even seen, not because it lacks entertainment value and competence, but because it is ideologically unapproved.
I suspect that the biggest reason for the mounting hysteria of these attacks is that conservative content can now compete with Hollywood in the metric that matters most: quality. In the past, faith-based films and politically conservative films were often not very good. The people making them were outsiders without access to capital, stars, and behind-the-camera talent. Those days are over. We’re now making great films that can compete. Shows like Red Alert and House of David are joining movies like Sound of Freedom, Guns & Moses, Jesus Revolution, The Last Rodeo, and the surprisingly unwoke Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
The leftist attacks on these movies are doing harm, especially to smaller films that lack massive marketing budgets, but word-of-mouth among Americans is still more powerful. We now have top-quality movies to choose from, and if we want more of them, we need to support the films that are 1) entertaining, 2) consistent with our values, and 3) under attack by the leftist swarm.
Salvador Litvak wrote and directed Guns & Moses. He is the author of the bestselling book Let My People Laugh: Greatest Jewish Jokes of All Time! and he shares Jewish wisdom and humor online at Accidental Talmudist.
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