Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, (who was at The Undefeated screening I attended in Chicago last year). His overall takeaway is the one that seems to be forming up as the conventional wisdom about the film—that it will evoke sympathy for Sarah Palin even among her detractors.
She was thrust into a most unusual situation and everyone knows what it feels like to be in over your head. That’s the kind of fairness that will play well to everybody except the bottiest of the Palinbots who will not be able to entertain the notion that she ever was or ever could be in over her head. It seems like the fan club would love the phase where Palin stands up to her handlers. However, in my observation while researching the phenomenon for some fiction I’m working on, the hardcore supporters will discount the whole endeavor if every detail does not play out like a testimonial for canonization.
I’ll add to the list as I run across more reviews. Film and TV reviewers have seen the film, and we can expect more political writers to weigh in after the Washington premiere. Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews have mentioned they’ve already seen it.
Julianne Moore, who plays Palin in Game Change, will be a guest on Morning Joe today.
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, co-authors of the Game Change book, gave a 55-minute interview to C-SPAN that aired on Wednesday. The video is not embeddable, so you’ll have to go there. The authors have talked about the book on C-SPAN before, but with the HBO movie premiering in a week, it’s very much back in the news.
If you are mostly interested in the juicy Palin bits, as the screen adapters were, skip to 33:00 or so. The whole interview is good, though, and is supplemented by several clips from the 2008 campaign. I enjoyed the book, and think it made sense for HBO to focus on just one of the storylines from it. If it had been a mini series, that would have been a different matter, but for a two-hour movie, some honing in seems appropriate. Of course Palin fans are outraged that HBO had the nerve to adapt only a part of the book. Apparently that particular creative choice should not be allowed.
Check out Halperin’s new Twitter avatar based on a 2010 Archie comiccover.
The media blitz is upon us
Get ready for a packed week of promotion running up to the March 20 debut. Heilemann was on Bill Maher’s panel last night. Howard Kurtz will do a panel about the movie on Sunday.
Update:
Here a take on the movie from David Frum, every liberal’s favorite conservative. He will be on Kurtz’s Reliable Sources program on CNN too, not sure if it will be to talk about Game Change or Limbaugh. He’d be a likely candidate for either or both segments. I shouldn’t link to this dumb Reliable Sources show page. CNN doesn’t have a page of RS video that I can find on its otherwise decent news site.
New York Times article by Brian Stelter, who addresses HBO’s choice to focus only the Palin story
Blog post by Time magazine TV watcher, James Poniewozik. He thinks Game Change is a bad movie but counters Palin’s assertion that it is based on a false narrative by saying he “doubt[s] that every reporter who’s covered the McCain-Palin campaign has falsified things.”
HBO and the net
How about post-premiere scraps for the internet crowd, HBO? Have you thought about trying something special online—like organizing a watch and chat event? (After the Saturday night debut, please; first-time viewers will want to give it their full attention.) Or how about allowing embeds of selected longer scenes, so bloggers can offer teasers as entertainment, not just your promotional trailers?
HBO can tend to the clumsy and greedy in its social media tactics. A few months ago I tried the “Tweet this” feature from the excellent HBO Go iPad app, and was horrified and embarrassed to see that I’d tweeted not a pointer to the program I was watching but a pitch to my followers to download the app. I’m sure I was expecting to send a friendly GetGlue sort of message like “I’m watching [so and so].” But that’s how brands learn what not to do in social, because they will get loud and instant feedback about missteps. Then there’s that all-Flash site of theirs. And pointers from iOS devices take you to the mobile home page—not to the specific page you were trying to read.
But I adore HBO, generally, as TV, honestly I do. It brought me The Wire (David Simon gave it to me), and that’s impacted my life as much as my passion for Jane Austen and George Eliot books, which is considerable.
You have to wonder if HBO is planning for the inevitable pirating of the movie by people who don’t subscribe but really want to see this movie. I hope they’ll go easy on the thieves, realizing they will be mostly extremely interested viewers and prospective subscribers, not resellers. We can’t all afford premium channels, though a lot of us 99ers scrimp in other ways to compensate for the luxury. Scheduling a free access period while the movie is in heavy rotation would serve the channel’s image best in the long run—far better than meting out punishment, or even considering black avenger countermeasures.
Rachel Maddow talked last night about the Virginia women who organized the dramatic silent protest against the state’s proposed bill requiring ultrasounds prior to abortions. They raised a big crowd and pulled it off on Facebook.
Check out the video of the silent protest. It’s chilling.
The Right uses Facebook to rally the troops, too. American Grizzlies United, a pro-Sarah Palin group, (tries to) supplement its push to recruit GOP national convention delegates on its Facebook page.
Palinistas seem to have a tight Venn diagram of overlapping fan circles which helps the network effect, but each of the circles are relatively small. The synergy sounds loud right in the eye of the storm but its influence never reaches much of the electorate that has long made up its mind about Palin. That’s not to say the groups don’t have a large presence online; it’s just that blogs may be the medium of choice. The Conservatives4Palin website, founded by a blogger who later worked as a communications aide for Palin, enjoys a flood of traffic and an active, lively, passionate and committed community of commenters.
McCain would “continue to have an open dialogue” with the queen of England on the subject [of Britain’s waning support for the war in Iraq].
That’s how Sarah Palin reportedly responded to a Steve Schmidt question during an issues coaching session during the 2008 campaign, according to a Saturday L.A. Times story on HBO’s Game Change movie. It is sure to spread like wildfire across the internet today. The Politico segment on Morning Joe mentioned it this morning (though I don’t see a post about it yet at 7:30 a.m. Central time). John Heilemann, a co-author of the book on which the adaptation is based, was on the Joe Show panel and defended the book’s reporting, calling the work a historical account.
The astonishing addition to the Encyclopedia Palinignorata already is being tweeted at a fair clip. When another MSNBC show mentions it, the tale will get tweeted more often, then another MSNBC show will notice the net buzz and mention it again, because ... that’s how this works.
The incident is one of a few new tidbits about Palin that will be revealed in the movie that were not reported in the Halperin-Heilemann book, according to the Times story. Schmidt confirmed the veracity in an interview. He had to explain to Palin that Great Britain’s prime minister heads the government.
Why will this be a big deal today? 1) It fits a pattern (which is different from a spun-up narrative). 2) We’re dumbfounded to conceive of the idea that the governor of a state would not know something we knew in junior high, if not grade school. Why won’t it matter to many of Palin’s staunchest fans? They may share the same knowledge gaps—and some of them are proud of it.
(You’ll have to forgive my obsession with Palin; I’m writing some fiction that includes a character something like her, and the preoccupation sometimes seeps up to the public surface as I puzzle through how to draw the character.)
This morning WaPo’s The Fix remarked on John McCain’s statement yesterday that voters were divided on Ronald Regan just as they are on Sarah Palin, bringing up a key difference when it comes to comparing the two politicians.
“There are basically no Palin Democrats. And given the passions she evokes, it’s hard to see how such a group would form,” the bloggers point out.
They make a great point, but I think she does more than EVoke passions, she actively PROVokes them with her continual cheerful sneering at libs. In fact she’s painted herself into a corner. Anything she says to attempt to appeal to Dems will turn off her base because they love love love it—and her—when she gives voice to their resentments about elites, cityfolk and booksmart pencilnecks. It’s kind of a sweet sharing-bonding thing she has with her fans.
And some of her most supportive camps are way, way out there: over on Free Republic they’re saying Karl Rove is a liberal; and some of the Christian groups in 2008 were praying God would smite McCain so their Sarah might achieve her destiny.
If she doesn’t win the nomination she still will want to keep that base (which might be better characterized as a market).
You know how blogs, news sites and entertainment sites put “Sarah Palin” in a headline (which often also puts the words in the URL) to rack up page views? Liberal, conservative, small blogs, big media—it works for everybody for different reasons.
Well, there’s a fair chance I am completely full of shit, but I think the TLC Channel’s new supplemental site for the Sarah Palin’s Alaska show is purposely courting controversy. The site provides four blogs and a podcast to serve as a newer-media add-on to the traditional network show site. One of the blogs, called Not Taking Sides is the place to talk about politics, because, even though the TV series is non-political, politics are going to come into it, the inaugural post sort of explains.
It makes sense for TLC to do this from a marketing perspective. It’s true that the show is going to be political no matter how it’s positioned so why shouldn’t the very entity that’s creating the buzz get in on some of the discussion action? Negative comments about Palin are not scrubbed, and call me cynical, but some of them almost look like seed comments—they’re too well punctuated and use proper capitalization rules.
Head blogger for the politics section will be Matt Gagnon, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He’s busy working on a recount, they don’t say whose—maybe Joe Miller’s? So he will show up later.
It’s a funny old world out there in new media land, when commercial interests get in the game and the genuine might be genuine, or it might be a hustle, or might be a little of both.
You have to wonder, though, if Sarah is down with stirring the pot. Admitting there is a political angle runs counter to every description she has applied to the show. She might be OK with it, since the environment is somewhat controlled.
I peer into FreeRepublic.com every other week or so to get a feel for right-wing sensibilities for some fiction I’m working on. After seeing the Newsmax clip of Sarah Palin fretting about Iran on Morning Joe this morning, I looked in. A freeper suggested Sarah Palin’s remarks about armageddon would cause liberals to believe she is peddling end-of-days rhetoric. Well, yes. That is the first thing I thought of.
Of course I worry that she may believe Jesus will come sooner if we attack Iran, or if we indicate we wouldn’t mind if Israel did, just as I worry about evangelicals in the Pentagon.
Whether she believes it or not, this kind of talk plays to her base. A Pew poll published this summer said 58% of white evangelicals believe Jesus Christ will return to earth by 2050.
Drill down to her even more devoted base—the undereducated, whether or not they identify as evangelicals:
In addition, those with no college experience (59%) are much more likely than those with some college experience (35%) and college graduates (19%) to expect Jesus Christ’s return. By region, those in the South (52%) are the most likely to predict a Second Coming by 2050.
Palin isn’t just a joke. She’s dangerous because she would put her faith in dominionists while putting her trust in neocons who have a complimentary world agenda. Imagine Randy Scheunemann calling the shots for the world.
President Obama said “Let’s try common sense” in the State of the Union speech Wednesday night.
Here’s the Twitter reaction. Obama fans like the idea. The Right scoffs. (If you see this seven days from now, the search link will lead to an empty results page; Twitter doesn’t keep historical searches.)
Bonus: I found this in my searches this morning—a November 2009 accounting of Governor Palin’s fondness for the phrase by Chris Kelly, a writer for Bill Maher’s show who blogs at Huffington Post.
But… but… but… Governor Palin says too much regulation caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And I think I need to believe her story, because… she’s just like me, and… socialism… and take our guns… and ivy league elitism… and… and… freedom!
“Palin has devoted a dismayingly prominent chunk of her book to scapegoating communications aide Nicolle Wallace for supposedly forcing her to wear designer clothes.” Nov. 17, 2009, Boston Globe editorial.
Salon’s editor, Joan Walsh, put this headline on her opinion piece yesterday: ”I have Palin fatigue already.” Me too. No, not really.
Here’s Walsh’s thought, way down at the end, that prompted me to awaken from blog hibernation.
So while I’m not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I’m particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven’t done enough to change that. Palin can’t change any of that, but Obama can. There’s still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.
I agree that populist sentiment on the right could be rechanneled, but I wouldn’t leave it up to the president or the Democrats in Congress to take charge of the effort.
Liberal citizens could do more. We could not only rechannel populist mojo but reclaim it. What if progressives started showing up at the next round of town halls to agree with bits of the anger at the way things are going, but suggest other means to change it? To decry Wall Street dominance of the halls of power right along with our louder neighbors, but point to other ways out?
Cultural and ideological gulfs are so hard to bring oneself to bridge. Reminds me of a Therapy Sisters song. The Austin, TX-based female folk ensemble sings about how easy it is for feminists to claim identification with the suffering of third-world women, but not so easy to throw in with the bow heads (sorority members) across campus.
So, sue me. I’m fascinated with Sarah Palin. The idea of her intrigues me in a jaw-dropping, can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing, stun-me-again way.
As the Vanity Fair article and the resignation announcement played out and the critics weighed in, I let it all wash over me (OK, OK, I sought it out). Commentary on her debate prep was the stuff my imagination is made of. I can picture the grueling sessions now, with the aid of Todd Purdum’s nice descriptive gifts. Then up pops Mark McKinnon on the tube. He supported Obama, so he coached Palin on style points but not on policy.
So I construct this even more vivid picture of desperate, futile coaching and it feels like something I’ve seen before but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Then, finally, just now it hit me. She’s Lina Lamont, in Singin’ in the Rain, who will not achieve round tones in this lifetime, or at least not within a reasonable enough period of time to endure further coaching.
As Purdum describes in the article, the campaign team members “worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be.”
The “might never be” part is what spooked Lina’s handlers in the movie. Having little time to bring out the Dancing Cavalier as a talkie with Lina’s annoying voice, they bailed on the voice, dubbing in the competent speaking and singing voice of the Debbie Reynolds character.
