I have no working knowledge of whether the movie Game Change is any good. I suspect that it's probably significantly better than the book for a couple reasons. First, most of the terrible writing found within the book was not going to show up in the screenplay -- sorry, fans of "psychic solar plexuses," but screenwriters of HBO's caliber are nominally interested in putting words on the screen that make some sense. Second, the sprawling tome of campaign gossip and imagined scenes has been pared down to just the part where Sarah Palin is picked as John McCain's vice president. In fact, it looks to me like the movie isn't so much "Game Change" as it is "Steve Schmidt And Nicolle Wallace Will Have Their Revenge On Sarah Palin."
But if there was one segment of the HBO-subscribing population that just had to make "Game Change" appointment viewing, it was the political media. And they obviously have a lot of questions. Was the movie fair to Sarah Palin? Was she a sympathetic character or a "head case?" And was it truly revelatory? After all, as one person points out, "it's not as if everyone thought that the former governor of Alaska was a genius." In that way, everyone seems to forget that we can only call this movie "Game Change" because the media hailed the move to put Palin on the ticket as a masterstroke.
Oh, but who can remember the exciting political narratives they crafted one minute and discarded the next. This movie is still worth the media getting frothed-up anew over, if for no other reason that this was all stuff they talked about, for a long part of their lives, on the teevee. They lived all the shiny sights and all the buzzy sounds of this pivotal time in American life. The events in the movie are just as Wolf Blitzer is told he remembered them, by his wranglers.
And so, with the help of HuffPost video editor Hunter Stuart, we have assembled a highlight reel of the media getting over-excited about a story to which they already knew the ending.
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