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While everyone else is lining up for the end of the Harry Potter saga, a new documentary film about Sarah Palin will be opening Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills. Grapevine will be one of the only places to see it, too; the movie is being kept out of the blue states entirely and is only showing at nine other locations (all of them AMC theaters) in the entire country. The film is titled The Undefeated. I guess walking away from one’s job before a tricky re-election campaign is a way to stay undefeated.

The movie is the work of Stephen K. Bannon, who’s best known for In the Face of Evil, Reagan’s War in Word and Deed, a rather portentous 2004 film that played in a few North Texas theaters at the time. The Undefeated has, predictably, not been screened for most movie critics, but those who’ve seen it say that the film emphasizes Palin’s moderate record as governor of Alaska, working with Democrats in the state legislature and forcing Big Oil to pay up in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster. No word on how the movie reconciles that Palin with the pandering-to-the-conservative-base public figure that we see now. In an ominous sign, the New York Post‘s hard-right-leaning film critic Kyle Smith slammed the movie in no uncertain terms, calling it “an excruciating combination of bombast and whining” and said he’d rather watch a Michael Moore film. Whoa!

In other Palin-related movie notes, British actress Lucy Punch says she based her character in Bad Teacher on Palin. She certainly delivers her dialogue with a familiar twang. Julianne Moore is portraying Palin in the HBO documentary adaptation of Game Change. And Palin is also the subject of an upcoming documentary by Nick Broomfield. If you’ve never seen one of Broomfield’s muckraking documentaries, let’s just say he’s like Michael Moore if Moore were a skinny, bespectacled, upper-class British guy. I’m going to go out on a limb and say his film will be more critical of its subject than The Undefeated.

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One more note: On a weekend dominated by a movie about wizards and witchcraft, I can’t believe someone missed the opportunity to release a documentary about Christine O’Donnell.

4 COMMENTS

  1. “The Undefeated” propagandist filmmaker Stephen Bannon recently said in an interview, “People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl. I’ve studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style.”

    Leni Riefenstahl found fame in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and became Nazi Germany’s most famous film maker. In a state where women played a secondary role to men, Riefenstahl was given a free hand by Hitler to produce propaganda films for the Nazi regime. In 1933, Riefenstahl made a short film about the Nazi Party’s rally of that year. She was asked to make a much grander film of the 1934 event. This led to probably her most famous film – “Triumph of the Will”. The film won awards in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

    A Nazi-style inspired 2 hour political ad to showcase the “real” Sarah Palin? Why are we not surprised?

  2. To Pilotlight, your opinion is appreciated and guarded by the !st Amendment. But I seriously doubt a certain couple of documentaries “A man from Hope” and “An Inconvenient Truth” would garner the same blistering comments from you expressed above. To the Weekly: your opinion was mild compared to others. You guys do have some good articles.

  3. To Roy:I think that ” Gordo” Michael Moore’s Gynecomastia is more up your philosophical alley–so to speak.
    To PilotLight .Whew I think I smell some natural gas eminating from your defective instrumentation. I don’t think I have ever heard Palin embrace conformity and big gov’t control of all aspects of one’s life including healthcare…On the other hand, your Idol Obummer is MUCH more like Hitler and Stalin in that respect. The majority of the American press salivates all over him. I think that you are unwittingly conceding that Bannon is an independent and more effective communicator.

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