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.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin and her camp may be raking in media hits by complaining about the portrayal of Palin in HBO’s upcoming movie about the 2008 presidential election, an adaptation of Game Change. But Hollywood seems to be giving more than it’s taking away from the Palin family lately: Bristol Palin’s just inked a deal with Lifetime to do a new reality series, following in her mother’s footsteps. The show promises “never-before-granted access to Bristol’s real-life experiences growing into womanhood, Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp will reveal how she adjusts to her life in Alaska, where daily she faces the many pressures of raising her toddler son Tripp alone and maintains the close relationship she holds with her parents.”

For all the Palins complain about their treatment by Hollywood, this deal is actually a sign of the industry’s generosity to the family. Sarah Palin’s Alaska started out with strong ratings for TLC, but they declined, particularly in episodes where Palin was hunting or fishing, and TLC declined to order a second season of the program. Her special on Fox News, one of the things the network hoped would make her a star on the network, didn’t exactly sparkle in the ratings either.

And Palin, more than any other member of her family, ought to have been the draw: she was the one who was rocketed to national prominence and national controversy. If she didn’t exactly turn into a television star, even when she was given a couple of chances in a couple of different formats, it’s hard to see why there’d be a strong market for a show about a second-tier member of the family whose main prior accomplishment in the entertainment industry is a stint on Dancing With the Stars and a novelty appearance on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. For all the Palins complain about the way Hollywood treats them, the industry certainly seems generous about continuing to cut them paychecks.

The bridge is yours.

-It’s quite odd that Sarah Palin’s team thinks media ethics dictate they’d get script approval of Game Change.

-From the WWE to VOD in China.

-Hollywood gets behind Elizabeth Warren.

-How Eminem’s lawsuit could change our understanding of digital purchases—and artists’ takes.

-Footage from Pixar’s newest short, La Luna, which will debut in front of Brave:

The bridge is yours.

-The final word on Chris Brown.

-Ryan McGee on how HBO killed the episode.

-Get a track off Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” every day for the next nine days.

-Ah, the joys of a good old-fashioned public art controversy.

-The weirdest political endorsements by musicians.

The bridge is yours.

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

-The best review I’ve read of Lana Del Ray’s album.

-The Smithsonian adds the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to its network.

-Great prints of classic pop-culture real estate.

-A first glimpse at Skyfall, the next James Bond movie.

-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here: