Both before and after their founder’s death, Andrew Breitbart’s entertainment site, Big Hollywood, was making hay (and presumably garnering pageviews) by complaining about the presentation of Sarah Palin in HBO’s movie adaptation of Game Change. Now, one of Palin’s strongest Hollywood defenders, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, has been named one of the people who will steward Breitbart’s stable of publications: he’s a founding board member of Breitbart News and now will become executive chairman of the company.

It’s not entirely clear what the change in leadership will mean for the fiscal health of the company or for Big Hollywood’s coverage in particular. It’s had to imagine that any one person, much less any set of people, will be able to neatly replace Breitbart as an enthusiastic fundraiser or as a public face of the brand. The Undefeated made just $100,085 at the box office, and Bannon’s other movies haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Big Hollywood already devotes considerable space to the complaint that Hollywood isn’t responsive to conservative values and is leaving a substantial conservative market untapped. Whether Bannon’s elevated role in the company increases the volume of those complaints or provides new perspective on them remains to be seen.

Earlier in the week, I wrote that we could probably save our time and breath by not wasting time condemning Kirk Cameron for, totally unsurprisingly, telling the world he disapproves of gay people. On a larger scale, the exact same thing is true of Sarah Palin. Once a potentially powerful figure in the Republican party, she’s become an entirely conventional low-level media personality. The only reason there’s any sense that she is a more important figure is because Sarah Palin and the people around her are genius trolls, masters at turning everything into an opportunity for grievance and another shot at inclusion in the news cycle—even if the possibility of dominating it is long past. The latest voluminous fuel for their fire? HBO’s Game Change, an adaptation of and expansion on the sections of the book by the same name that explore John McCain’s late-breaking selection of Palin to be his running mate in the 2008 election, and the unraveling of the campaign that followed. For the past several weeks, complaining about the movie’s taken up almost as much oxygen in the conservative media criticism industry as Rush Limbaugh’s self-destruction, even though the latter act is of far greater import in American politics.

Which is funny, because the movie doesn’t particularly deserve it. This is not to say it’s good. Julianne Moore’s Palin impersonation is dandy, but for most of the movie, Game Change mostly feels like a very high-minded episode of Saturday Night Live: you’re mostly comparing the impressions and the reality in a way that doesn’t let you enter the narrative, a process that’s not aided by the less-than-naturalistic dialogue.

But most importantly, the only way this exhaustingly-trod story could have been genuinely revelatory is if it had any insight into Palin’s personality. But except for a single scene where Palin breaks down while talking to her son Track, who is deployed overseas, Game Change has next to no interest in translating a woman whose motivations and worldview have been infuriatingly indecipherable to large swaths of the American electorate. Instead, it zips through a cycle of emotions dominated, in this retelling of the narrative, by Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace: excitement that they’d found a potential star, dismay that she wasn’t living up to expectations, and then a sense of oracular satisfaction that they saw Palin was awful before most other people did. it’s a weirdly self-satisfied—and self-justifying—narrative.

And that attitude, more than anything else about this oddly overdue project, is what makes Game Change frustrating. Sarah Palin has everything to lose and precisely nothing to gain from depictions that point her, as Game Change does at various point, as an overzealous evangelical Christian; a dummy; defiant of authority; or even as a horror movie monster, raging against her advisers in a claustrophobic stairwell. And those of us who dislike Palin have everything to gain by recognizing that we really, truly won: Palin’s gone from the national stage. And her fiasco of a campaign has guaranteed that if Republicans nomination someone who is ludicrously underinformed, grievance-driven, and prone to wacky policy positions, they’ll do it through a highly-vetted process that likely exposes that person to the American electorate over an extended period of time. We should accept that, be done with the victory dance, and get down to examining the next generation of plausible Republican rising stars. The greatest damage we could do to Sarah Palin—and one of the better things we could do for ourselves—is to move on from her, totally and irrevocably.

I’ll have longer thoughts on Game Change, HBO’s adaptation of John Heilmann and Mark Halperin’s 2008 campaign book, closer to the movie’s air date. But one thing that struck me as strange about the movie was that it focuses entirely on John McCain and Sarah Palin, a story that’s both been done to death and is essentially irrelevant: Palin is a PR phenomenon and McCain will never be president. They’ve both returned from whence they came. By contrast, the story of how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarded each other in the buildup to and during the 2008 campaign, and how they came to be partners rather than enemies, is both directly relevant to ongoing events and a much richer story than that of John McCain’s taking a flyer on his VP selection.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that it would be extremely difficult to cast a credible Obama. Fred Armisen’s impression of the president is laughable. Jordan Peele has Obama’s voice entirely locked down, but he doesn’t particularly look like him. I have no idea if Adrian Lester has the voice, or could figure out how to do it, but he’s got the look, or could pull it off plausibly. I also really like the idea of the main character from Primary Colors, who was responsible for wrangling John Travolta’s Bill Clinton stand-in character, returning to the movies as Obama. There are obvious decent stand-ins for Hillary: Emma Thompson could also step back into those shoes post Primary Colors, not to mention my personal favorite candidate Judith Light. But Obama is tricky—and important—to get right.