Let's see what our friends in Canada think of the movie "Game Change."

Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in Game Change.

Courtesy of the Globe and Mail:

The movie dramatizes only one section – the John McCain campaign in 2008 from the choice of Sarah Palin as candidate for vice-president to the night McCain lost. The movie, like the book, is not speculative or based on hearsay. Much of it is based on an account of the McCain campaign by Steve Schmidt, a Republican Party campaign strategist, who is played by Woody Harrelson in the movie, with multiple eyewitness corroborations. 

Watching it with the American journalists was an education. At first, as the movie opened with McCain (Ed Harris) and his advisers discussing potential running mates, there was a jaunty satirical tone. There was laughter in the room. Even as the Palin character (Julianne Moore plays her with aplomb) entered the picture, all gee-whiz enthusiasm, there was lots of laughter. 

Then the laughing stopped. There was silence. Then there were groans of embarrassment. Not because the movie is mediocre. It’s actually thrillingly good. But because the depth of Palin’s ignorance of the world became clear. 

It is a devastating portrait of Palin. And a searing indictment of the McCain camp for selecting her. As the movie tells it, Palin was vetted quickly and became the running mate in order to swiftly boost McCain’s chances against a soaring Barack Obama. Then, after Palin’s unveiling as the running mate, the team, especially Schmidt, set about preparing her for media interviews and a vice-presidential candidates debate. 

It was around that period in the movie that many reporters in the room sighed. Some cursed. Others slumped in their chairs. It is made crystal clear that Palin didn’t really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea. She clearly thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. She needed to have Germany’s role in the Second World War explained to her. She thought “the Fed” referred to the federal government, not the Federal Reserve. The Governor of Alaska was as ignorant of the world as a four-year-old. Except of course, voters were being asked to put this ludicrously uninformed person, in the proverbial phrase, “a heartbeat away from the presidency.” 

Under pressure, but with a profound sense of her own importance, Palin crumbles. In one scene, she is catatonic, curled up, immobile in a fetal position because she’s been dieting. In another she screams at a McCain staffer on her cellphone and then smashes the phone against a wall. She is depicted as someone who could be taught to memorize generic replies to questions from journalists, but could not recognize her own ignorance. As the movie shows it, after every appearance before cheering crowds her ego swelled and she simply declined to listen to any advice about anything. 

A key scene, memorably surreal, shows Julianne Moore as Palin watching Tina Fey play Palin on TV. Palin’s face is rigid with mystification.

Yeah I doubt that anybody can really point to this as a favorable depiction of Palin.

Of course if HBO was going to remain true to the book, and honest about who Palin really is, then how could it be?

I imagine that it is also going to be almost as difficult for many journalists to watch, as indicated above, since they will be confronted with the fact that they seriously let down the American people by not doing their jobs in the first place. The Alaska bloggers did their best, but it seemed like it took forever for them to REALLY start listening to us.

And for our resident Palin fairy tale trolls who constantly bitch that nobody can really judge her without speaking with her and getting her side of her story, remember she had her chance:

At today’s TCA panel on HBO’s movie Game Change, director/executive producer Jay Roach said he tried to get Sarah Palin’s cooperation for the film about the 2008 presidential election, which is based on the book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. “On behalf of the (film), I wrote a long letter explaining that I thought it would ‑‑ we would just do better at getting the story right if she would talk to us,” said Roach, also the director of HBO’s Recount, about the 2000 presidential race. “And I got a very quick email back from her attorney saying, ‘I checked. She declines.’ So I took that as, you know, the final answer.” Still, Game Change writer Danny Strong (who also penned Recount) said he was able to interview 25 people connected with the 2008 campaign. He did not get John McCain or his speechwriter Mark Salter but said, “I got everybody else, including people who are not portrayed in the film.”

And of course that is the same result that almost ANYBODY who has ever tried to give Palin the chance to tell her side of the story has run into. She flatly refuses to cooperate and then claims that people are spreading lies about her.

Which as we know in Palin-speak is another word for "telling the unvarnished truth."