“Melania” suffers from Lance Dance-itis | Engel Angle

This is the fourth time I've had to record this, which means one of two things.
I'm terrible at technology, or this is a terrible episode.
Mac Angle, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Angle Angle Podcast, here on the Sunset Lounge,
Full Disclosure.
Today's subject is about a political figure, but it is not political talk.
When the Sunset Lounge was founded, there was a decision made at the very top to say,
we were not going to swim in the endless cesspool that is political commentary.
Good decision might I add, mostly for because I don't think we need any more of political commentary
and because it is just so damn depressing.
Talking instead about a political figure that is at the center of the new, big, hot, blockbuster film
that everybody is talking about, and I'm talking, of course, about Melania.
That is the one hour and 44 minute documentary that was released this week to critical acclaim.
I mean critics acclaimed it being in theaters.
So as a homework assignment, I decided to go see Melania.
I wanted to see for myself what everybody was talking about.
I wanted to see with my own two eyes why this is the big new hot movie.
If there can be such a thing as a big new hot movie that's released at the end of January and the first of February,
I fully realize that movie release dates don't mean what they once did in the age of streaming.
However, this is still the time of not big documentaries or big blockbuster films like Top Gun and Maverick
and anything with Glenn Powell or Sidney Sweeney in it, but rather Liam Neeson, Grade B, Action Flicks.
That I like, by the way.
If you are putting a movie out in theaters at the end of January or February,
that is a telltale sign of one thing.
It stinks.
The studio knows it stinks and they're just shoveling out there because they know they just got to get it on screens
before they rush it to streaming or partly streaming platforms.
That is exactly what has happened with Melania, but this is part of a broader discussion about a subject
not that I care about Melania Trump, but rather this is about a subject that I do care about a lot
and that is the evolution of a genre that I really enjoy and apparently you do too and that is documentary films.
Why am I going to dedicate an entire topic of a podcast to documentary films because they've become incredibly popular
and because there's an evolution and a strain now of documentaries that are not documentaries but commercials
and infomercials and nothing more than one hour or 90 minute or sometimes even seven or eight hour films
that are glorified worship sessions of a particular topic because they have either been funded by,
produced by or a minimum cosigned by the subject.
That is not a documentary.
Melania is not a documentary.
It's commercial.
There's nothing really that interesting about her in the first place and I don't hate Melania Trump.
It's nothing about that.
This is a woman who used her beauty.
This is a smart woman by the way.
She speaks six languages I think, but she used her beauty to become a professional model which gained her access to lifestyle and a life
and people of means that she probably was maybe not going to have otherwise.
She is not the first woman by the way to do that.
Nor will she be the last.
Does it mean that she merits a one hour and 45 minute documentary?
Yes.
If she went there.
The only way you can make a documentary worth being called a documentary and not a commercial is if the subject or the director is willing to go there.
And I'm talking about the places that they don't want to go and that's what makes it interesting.
That's what separates it from PR and that's what separates it from being journalism or a documentary as we know it.
For the longest time, documentaries existed as basically something that I think most of America or consumers thought that's homework.
It's on PBS. It's an hour.
Nobody watches it. Nobody know makes the films.
And it's basically something that if they showed it to you in class, you were excited because that meant you didn't have to listen to the teacher and you can watch it on the screen.
But probably the lights were going to be turned off and you can fall asleep.
That's what documentaries were.
I bet you can probably name one documentary filmmaker.
You can probably name a dozen directors.
Can you name more than one documentary filmmaker?
Ken Burns is the one that everybody knows Ken Burns.
And he has made a career out of producing and directing award winning documentaries.
Documentaries that he had to go knock on doors and fund himself when I think of a documentary and taking a subject and really exploring it,
you have to do it, looking through it at multiple angles.
As many as possible because that gives you a clear picture of the colors that are involved on a particular person or subject, period of time or whatever.
You need to give it a complete picture of what it is.
And that's what he did and that's what Warner Herzog did.
That's what some other people did as well.
For a long time and then as cable television came around and then streaming platforms and then the ease of making a documentary became more common.
We started to see an explosion in this genre to the point now we're just seeing documentaries everywhere.
I mean, it's incredible how many documentaries that exist now go if you have a subscription platform, just type it in the search bar documentary and see how many come up.
You're like, oh my god, how could there be this many documentaries?
And it's like anything else you look at and say, do we?
Do we really need a documentary on Jeremy Lynn?
Do we need a documentary on boogie cousins?
Do we need another documentary on murder mystery or something like that?
That's a very subjective thing, right?
Because what I don't find particularly interesting as a documentary subject, somebody else might say the same thing.
And you could open that up. That opens a whole can of worms in terms of, yeah, do we really need another podcast?
Fair question.
And as I opened it up and I was looking at all these different documentaries, I'm like,
you know, I don't know. Do we need all these and some of them are spectacular?
Free solo about the man climbing up Al Capitan with no equipment, just his hands, remarkable documentary.
Man on a wire, nominated for Academy Award about the nut job who decided to,
this is back in the 70s, walk across a high wire that was attached to the twin towers and Manhattan.
It's very interesting.
There's so many other ones that are so good.
Icarus, Icarus was outstanding documentary.
Believe it one Academy Award for best documentary.
It was about the blood doping scandal sponsored by the Russian countries and others too,
but basically the Eastern black countries, Icarus.
I highly recommend you go find it.
There's so many other ones too.
ESPN's 30 for 30 documentaries, so many of them are outstanding.
And I highly recommend if you haven't had the opportunity, create the time to watch OJ made in America.
It's as good as any documentary ever made for a couple of reasons.
One, he told the director told the whole story of OJ.
And even if you don't even like OJ Simpson, who's now long gone,
even if that, that whole storyline makes your skin crawl,
he was a very important figure in the history of this country, certainly modern America.
And the through line of his story and the backstory,
OJ made in America explains all of it and was fascinating because he talked,
the director talked to everybody about it,
and it gave you a very good, complete picture of that story.
That's a documentary.
And that was worth doing.
Did we need a three hour documentary on American gladiators?
There's another fascinating thing to me about the explosion of documentaries
that dozens and dozens and dozens that have been produced on real-life crime.
Obviously, there's a market for it and it's women.
It baffles me.
You could take that same woman and ask her,
let's go watch a documentary about World War One or World War Two,
the Vietnam War, war.
She would run in the other direction.
Oh my god, no, I have no interest in watching that.
However, if you said, let's go watch this documentary about a woman who lost her mind,
killed her husband, killed her kids, and killed some other people too.
Date hours a long.
Sign me up.
Same person.
Don't get it.
So as I went down the list and I saw these documentaries made,
there are the conventional documentaries that are made that are sort of in the traditional,
journalistic sense, which gives you a full appreciation and idea of what the subject
they're covering is.
And because it's on a screen, which is very dangerous mind you,
you think what you're watching is the truth.
And one thing I asked about Ken Burns was, that's a name drop,
and I've interviewed him a couple of times, and I asked him about this explosion.
And the idea that just because somebody sees it as a documentary,
they're taking it as fact or truth.
And if there's one danger that I have seen in the course of my lifetime,
is that if people see it on TV, they will believe it.
It's astounding to me.
And you know, he gave kind of a vague, very nice answer about it.
He said, you know, the people that who are making these,
he hopes he was trying to honor and trying to be respectful and true to the facts
and that they are not just using it as mostly as a means to do propaganda.
So as we looked at it, how all of this is evolved.
And then we saw and heard about this documentary being made about Melania Trump,
which is very expensive.
The video quality, the production quality is great.
They spend a ton of money on it.
It looks good, but it doesn't tell you anything.
And that's what a documentary should do.
Does it tell you something that you didn't already know?
Does the subject give you something that they really didn't already know?
Netflix, a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago,
produced or pardon me, released the documentary on the fall of Diddy.
The hip hop star whose rise and fall was worthy of a documentary, I think.
I don't know if it was worth three hours.
I don't know, many things were three hours sometimes.
But it was worthy.
And I couldn't really figure out that I learned anything here.
Did it go any place here that I really didn't already know?
It talked to a number of people who felt obviously crossed by Diddy.
But I thought, did I really learn anything here that I didn't already know?
No, I'm not really maybe some a little bit.
And that was my complaint about Melania.
The big point about Melania is that nobody's going.
Nobody's going.
There was one person at the theater, by the way, when I saw it.
I think everybody who's going to see this movie are journalists looking for content
to write about and talk about on podcasts or news organizations or whatever else.
I don't think mass consumers are not going to see a documentary about anything
because it's a documentary.
People aren't going to the theaters these days anymore.
We're seeing theaters being closed right and left or being raised.
So they're not going to see anybody said, oh, the theater was packed.
People were cheering.
No, they weren't.
That's ridiculous.
People are going to see to the movie theater for big movies.
Movies that need to be seen on a big screen.
Top Gun Maverick, the mission impossible movies.
A couple of those types of movies.
Those are the movies that people will say, I will go spend the extra ten bucks
to go see it and experience it on the giant big screen.
Movies like F1, starring Brad Pitt.
That was incredible to see that on an iMac screen.
Amazing.
Is there really any documentary that you think, oh, I got to see that in theaters?
The only documentary that I can think of that really drew an audience to theaters
was the March of the Penguins.
Now that footage was just astonishing to see some of those images captured in Antarctica.
That was amazing.
And then you've got the Morgan Freeman factor.
Anytime Morgan Freeman narrates anything, people go see it.
Melania was not narrated by Morgan Freeman.
Melania is a commercial.
I guess if that's your thing, you like watching commercials and your big fan of the president,
then you'll watch anything they produce.
But that's all this is a commercial.
And to me, it's really not that much difference, different than one of the most worshiped
appreciated and watched sports documentaries of all time.
And I'll tell you what that is here in a second.
Hello, it's Mike Reiner of your dark companion here.
Let me ask you, are you looking for something to fill the long dead air hours of your day?
Well, join the Sunset Lounge DFW and your dark companion on patreon.com, YouTube,
and wherever you get your podcasts.
Replace those sad, slow hours with sports, pop culture, music,
woven into interesting conversations.
So step inside the green door, have a seat at the bar,
and get in the groove with those shows and so very much more.
So I think I am a party of one, one of one who stood atop a very small soapbox
and bitched in wine when the very popular ESPN 30 for 30,
the last dance was aired in 2020.
The last dance is the documentary about Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls.
And just to give you a little bit of a backstory on it, during that last season,
camera crews followed that Bulls team around and shot everything or a lot.
And then they put it in a shelf.
Believe it was in a production studio in New Jersey.
And before anybody could do anything with it,
Michael Jordan had to sign off on it.
That was his more or less, because it was more or less he was the star of the show and he had to approve it.
So then it would just collect a dust for years and years and years.
And then finally, I believe it was the year the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James won the NBA championship.
Michael Jordan said, okay, we can start moving forward on this project.
However, Michael Jordan more or less had content control on it.
He was the person who would approve who would be interviewed for that documentary.
And if you watch that documentary, which I believe was four parts, maybe longer than that,
you will notice it did not give a complete picture of Michael Jordan.
Much like Melania Trump, Michael Jordan's greatest asset to the last dance is his zombie-like approach to his privacy.
So when you have somebody who is that famous and that committed to their privacy,
give you anything it makes for must watch content.
That's why the last dance worked because that last dance documentary
didn't really give you anything you didn't already know.
It did give you some sound bites that were interesting.
It did give you some behind the scenes exchanges that were interesting.
And it was interesting because basically Michael Jordan was Elvis Presley.
And the only difference was so much of his life, he worked so hard at keeping private.
I never really thought Michael Jordan made for that interesting of a documentary.
For although one part of his career certainly did.
And that is when he played minor league baseball.
And that became the subject of a documentary about when Michael Jordan played for the Birmingham Barons minor league baseball team.
But you'll notice Michael Jordan didn't participate in any interviews for that documentary.
Another part to Michael Jordan's career would have been an interesting documentary, the gambling.
I mean, everybody knows about it. He would never talk about it.
You hear about all these sort of stories that exists like some sort of ghost or at a campfire.
Did he go there about the last dance? Absolutely not.
Michael Jordan's first marriage ended.
Apparently his first wife dated former NBA player Reggie Thius.
That famously was a point of contention with Michael Jordan, who as we know having watched that documentary
would take any particular sentence and say to me it was personal.
Everything was personal to Michael Jordan.
It's one of the reasons why he was so good because he would take anything, anything, any slight and flip it into some sort of ridiculous petty motivation.
Obviously it worked.
If you watched the last dance, it doesn't go anywhere or give you really anything.
It doesn't give you a complete picture of who Michael Jordan is because who Michael Jordan is ultimately is a bully.
It's kind of an asshole and in fairness to that, I don't know if you can achieve that kind of success without being a bit of a prick.
Being maybe a giant prick.
And by all accounts, Michael Jordan was a great player, respected, revered, worshiped, a man who changed professional sports in this country and abroad.
I'm not sure you could really do justice in any book trying to capture that man's legacy and what he did.
However, it does not excuse how he treated people and there are two parts, two parts in that documentary that to me, I'm like, that's a good documentary.
I was surprised he signed off on it to tell you the truth.
There's one exchange where a camera crew is on a team plane at the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan is sitting next to, I believe he was a rookie then Scotty Burrell.
And the guys have been out the night before and Michael is saying and revealing a bunch of things that clearly Scotty Burrell does not want on camera.
And if you watch it, but Scotty can't push too hard because he's a rookie and that's Michael Jordan and Michael totally knows it.
And he just mercilessly reveal some of these things that you can see Scotty Burrell is like, dude, don't be putting that out here.
Don't be putting that out there. Don't be saying that Michael does it anyways. Why?
Because you can.
And then the other part to me, this was the best part.
The other part came when the filmmaker asked Michael Jordan about how he treated his teammates.
And Michael's answer was, I was so driven because I wanted, I didn't just want to win for myself, I wanted all of my teammates and everybody else to enjoy.
And experience the thrills that come with winning championships and being great. I wanted it. I wanted it for them.
And I think there's probably some truth to that.
But I really think this was more about Michael's just ambition blind ambition to win at anything. And if you watch that clip.
Michael has a moment where he takes some deep breaths. And you can see, and I wouldn't have known this as a 20 year old man.
I don't think I would have known this as a 30 year old man. I certainly know it now.
That's a man who has regret. Regret is a part of life. That's okay. I think sometimes we try to convince ourselves too much. Oh, I have regrets regrets are okay. It's okay. You have to.
The trick is not to live in them. But that was a man with regret. That was a man who recognized boy, he probably made some poor decisions. He probably mistreated some people along the way.
And he understood it. Could he admit it? Probably not. Michael is notoriously thin skinned. It's, it's the root of the fallout of his relationship with Charles Barkley.
Charles Barkley is a commentator on TNT or was before when TSPM and on inside the NBA rather, Charles was very critical of Michael's tenure as the GM and owner of the Charlotte NBA franchise.
It really angered Michael. The fact that he was critical, even though the record supported Charles's point and the two haven't talked since.
That, that part. That's a good documentary. The other part. That's commercial. One part I want to make sure I add this movie came out. The last dance came out in 2020 and it was rushed to be put on air by ESPN and Disney by several months because of COVID.
And we had nothing new to watch and programmers recognized that if they put out the last dance now February or March of 20, whenever it was that the ratings would be there'd be a rating spike. And there was.
And that coincided with me and my career at the Fort Worth Start Telegram that we were all everybody in sports journalism was desperate for content. Like, what am I going to write about? What am I going to write about? There's just nothing going on. There's nothing going on.
And I thought, well, when they released the last dance, I'll call some guys through the Dallas Mavericks and ask about playing that Bulls team.
I figured if ever there was a time where I was going to have easily going to be able to get a guy on the phone to talk about Michael Jordan or anything for that matter. It was at that moment because we were all locked in our house.
Reach out to a couple guys. Nothing. Nothing. Reach out to the Dallas Mavericks. Yeah, Mack, we'll get you this guy, this guy, this guy.
Nothing. I thought, well, but they really don't like me. They don't know who I am. Just want to return my call. Whatever. So finally I got the PR guy on the phone. I said, hey, no one's calling me back. And he said,
Mack, you may not get a lot of help on this. I said, why? He's not a lot of guys liked Michael Jordan. Now, in fairness to the story, Dallas Mavericks legend, long time NBA player, Derek Harper.
It's part of the Mavericks broadcast team now called me back. Very helpful. Give me some good insight. Very complimentary of Michael Jordan. But to the other person's point, I can see now why not a lot of people liked him.
People don't like bullies. And that's what that's what it is. And I think probably for a long time, Michael was, I don't know if he is now, but that's probably what he was then for a long time. And ultimately maybe that's what made him so successful as a documentary subject.
It could have been so much better. It could have been so much more instead because of his reluctance to give out anything. And because he had final say on it, really the last dance really wasn't a documentary.
It's commercial. Maybe no different than Melania. So the next time you open up your subscription platform and you see all these different documentaries and documentaries and all this other stuff. Take a good look at it.
Make sure what you're actually watching. This is the documentary that gives you a complete picture of the subject that you want to learn something about. And not just commercial to buy something.
See you next time.
This is a stolen water media production.