Doc Clips: “Sarah Palin: You Betcha!”
August 8, 2011 1 Comment
The other Sarah Palin documentary, “The Undefeated,” hasn’t been a huge hit, though its gross is not awful for a non-fiction release, especially one so right-leaning. Could a lefty take on the former Vice President candidate do better? We’ll have to wait a bit, as Nick Broomfield‘s “Sarah Palin: You Betcha!” doesn’t even hit the festival circuit until next month, when it premieres in Toronto. I can see it being the filmmaker’s highest grossing doc since 1998’s “Kurt & Courtney,” which would put it well above the pro-Palin doc, if it can garner some positive reviews and decent distribution (Arc Entertainment holds U.S. rights) that sells it as a Michael Moore-ish doc.
And based on the first “teaser” clips, that shouldn’t be too hard. I prefer Broomfield’s sensationalist shtick to Moore’s, because he aims less for laughs and tends to seem genuinely a curious, albeit emotionally distanced, investigator in spite of his reputation for paying interviewees and hawking conspiracy theories. But it’s also hard to imagine he’s gotten much of substance here that other journalists have failed to get. Unless Broomfield has found people to testify that Palin shot both Kurt Cobain and Biggie Smalls and is currently hiding Tupac in her home — and I’m sure Broomfield could — I don’t even know how entertaining or interesting it will be compared to the filmmaker’s past works. I’m bracing for disappointment yet I also can’t help anticipating his first feature doc in five years, following a great two-film jump into narrative works.
Check out the two new clips after the jump.
First we have the very Moore-ish clip that hit the blogs last week, where Broomfield is seen obviously fruitlessly confronting Palin at a Q&A event:
Another video, which WordPress won’t let me embed, can be found over at Anthony Kaufman’s ReelPolitik blog. It’s a more familiar-looking clip displaying the usual Broomfield style of interview. There we have John Bitney, Palin’s former Legislative Director, and Alaska Senator Lyda Green. Still nothing too telling, so we’ll have to wait and see next month if there’s anything more.
About Christopher Campbell
Nothing But the Doc 
Run, Sarah run. Sarah Palin was so successful as a governor, she graduated early “Bitter Quitter”, she real is a “Dan Quayle” in heels. She clearly loves “dishing it out” but real can’t take it because she loves playing the victim card, poor thing. She fail as a VP candidate (her lie that her daughter was engaged was such a farce, selling celibacy, come on), her stand-up comic fiasco on the Jay Leno Show, please, her TV show canceled after declining rating, I guess her perpetual run for the White House (and taking the suckers money) is the only thing she can look forward. Didn’t Fake News make that other movie “undeveloped” or “under achiever” or something like that, right? Didn’t it break all box office records, oh yeah it did not, that Alaska dullard can‘t even finish the bus tour to nowhere. But since she is a coward she will only throw small minded rocks, poor thing. Since we already had an idiot “W” in the White House that caused our current economic debacle, America knows not to trust the GOP fools who flaunt the idiocy.