Brittany Luce

screening of the documentary Everyone Has an Opinion on Melania.

Regardless of how you feel about Melania Trump, the fact that a sitting first lady was paid $40 million by Amazon for a self-produced documentary about her own life

That is something worth examination.

The film follows First Lady Melania Trump's experience of the 20 days leading up to her husband's second presidential inauguration.

As it all unfolded, so did my perspective.

And I kept asking myself,

How is Melania any different from the dozens of self-produced celebrity documentaries that have gotten popular over the past 15 years?

Like, was Melania's film really a total switch up from, you know, Taylor Swift's Miss Americana, Katy Perry's Part of Me, or Beyonce's Life is But a Dream?

To be honest, I'm not so sure.

So I needed some big brains to tease this out.

With me,

are NPR arts critic Bob Mondello and New York Magazine film critic Alison Wilmore.

Bob, Alison, are your brains ready to discuss this?

Are you ready to dissect this?

Yeah, I'll never be ready.

Okay, well, we should just jump right in then.

Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

I will say that the word that came up for me when watching the Melania doc was shiny.

Like her hair was very shiny.