Word: wagged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going to happen this week, which is unfortunate for those tempted to introduce the "Wag the Dog" analogy -- a president bedeviled by scandal turning to war as a diversion. However, adds Dowell, "the pieces are clearly falling into place for a confrontation...
Satire is exceedingly difficult to pull of as a genre of film. Wag the Dog compounds this burden with black comedy. The load eventually proves to be too much for the film to carry, but the film has to be admired for its sheer effort. Everyone gets brutally skewered in this one: politicians, filmmakers, actors, reporters and, of course, the credulous masses...
...smartest thing about Wag the Dog is that Levinson never puts a face on the President. We never really know--nor really care--about his status or his quest to be reelected. Instead, whether Brean will actually have his Albanian showdown remains more important...
...Wag the Dog remains vastly entertaining even during its most tenuous moments. De Niro, for the first time in ages, is wonderfully likeable in the antihero role. We should hate, loath, despise Brean for his shameless dishonesty--but we don't. Instead, we welcome his machinations and feel strangely vindicated by the possibility of his pulling off the scheme. Hoffman is the perfect counterpart to De Niro's smug political monster. He vamps and raves about how 'producers get no respect,' and we get the strange sensation that he is himself a unabashed politician...
...matter how ridiculous the concept seems, we realize by the end of Wag the Dog that delusion of the masses on a grand scale is a brutally realistic possibility. The media has the power to whip up an emotional whirlwind so powerful that all of America gets trapped in the show. It is the concept, after all, that makes the disaster movies which studio execs love so deplorably viable. Audiences are bludgeoned with an onslaught of nifty special effects and pounded into submission. Who is to say politics is not the same...