MovieChat Forums > Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011) Discussion > Toronto Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival

posted 13 years ago by Jalapeno_Fro
4 replies | jump to latest

Just played in Toronto, so I'm guessing this board will start to fill up a little.

Anyone see it there? What'd you think?

"Wish not so much to live long as to live well." -Ben Franklin

[–] EclecticEnnui 13 years ago

It doesn't start screening at the festival until September 11th. (http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/sarahpalin) I've got tickets.

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[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] EclecticEnnui 13 years ago

So... how was it...?

As 'ugly' and 'nasty' as this article suggests?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/sep/12/nick-broomfield-sarah -palin-you-betcha-video

I haven't really watched the video and read the links. Anyway, my friend and I enjoyed it. I'll say right off the bat that I'm far from a Palin expert. The archive footage shown throughout definitely has mediocre picture quality, but I was fine with it. Several audience members laughed during the film and so did I, like the incident of her and the turkeys. I already saw video of it, which is weird and hypocritical, though it seemed to surprise audience members.

The film definitely has an anti-Palin slant and it amplified my feeling of not wanting to support her if I were American. However, I'm not sure how much of Nick Broomfield's voice-over narration is factual and how much I can rely on the comments of the interviewees. At the same time, the comments of someone who regrets campaigning for her bring me back to my non-supportiveness, for example. I don't know how much new information there is of her, unfortunately, if there is any. Aside from the ending, the film isn't powerful, yet I found it worth watching. The political effects many American viewers with take away from it obviously remains to be seen.

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[–] returnofthelovingdead 13 years ago

I saw it today at the Toronto International Film Festival. I'll start by being upfront about my political bias: I am not a conservative.

The message of the documentary is basically that Sarah Palin 1) has consistently misused her position in government to carry out vendettas against her personal and political enemies, and 2) is unwilling to accept her own career failures and instead throws the people around her under the bus.

The documentary was better than I expected it to be. I thought it would just be an hour and a half of the same old "haha, Sarah Palin is stupid" schtick, but it covered new ground by turning a critical eye to how she has treated those around her, including some of her most loyal supporters like campaign staff. However, it sometimes strained too hard to make Palin seem evil, such as playing cheesy ominous music over clips of her (it reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Homer says "Of course he's evil! Can't you hear the music?"). And as interesting as the filmmaker's focus on interviewing various people from her life (like school friends and neighbours) was, I couldn't help but wonder how reliable some of them were, as I'm sure all of us have people in our personal lives with axes to grind.