On W List of Movie Reviews
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Wag the Dog (1997)
Rate:
9
Viewed:
9/03, 3/06, 3/22
3/06:
Wag the Dog was theatrically released first, and then Bill Clinton had an "aha!" moment a month later.
His scandal in regard to Monica Lewinsky was starting to break out, and to distract everybody, an Al-Shifa pharmaceutical
factory in Sudan was bombed. The same technique was repeated later when a bombing campaign of Iraq was underway during
Clinton's impeachment trial.
"Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because a dog is smarter than its tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog."
The above for the opening scene is cute which means "to direct attention toward something less important from something else
that's more important." I've never been a fan of Barry Levinson's films because they're too Baltimore-ish for me, but
Wag the Dog is an instant political classic. Of the cast, it's Dustin Hoffman who gives a memorable performance, thus earning
himself an Oscar nomination.
All in all, Wag the Dog is ingenious.
3/22:
How can the U.S. President running for his second term avoid a scandal that's playing out in the media two weeks prior to the
election?
All he has to do is produce a war. The more unknown a country is in the place of an enemy, the better. It doesn't matter if the
war is fake. Nobody will know anyway. Straight out of the politics playbook, this is the premise for Wag the Dog, hence
the three lines:
"Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because a dog is smarter than its tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog."
That being said, it's a brilliant movie with impeccable performances, most especially by the Oscar-nominated Dustin Hoffman
in Robert Evans-like garb. His character Stanley Motss has the best lines such as "Try making
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Three of the horsemen died two weeks before the end of principal photography. This
is nothing!" Every time a plan backfires, Motss would resort to the last three same words before figuring out a new strategy
to get back into the game.
His team has to come up with a marketing gimmick. Enter Fad King. Instead of yellow ribbons, old shoes are
thrown up in the air. To mimic the recording session of "We Are the World," Willie Nelson gets together with other all-stars
to sing something moving about what's happening in Albania. After the fake war is abruptly ended, Motss asks for a
"good old shoe song" from a 30's recording of some folk collection that'll be placed in the Library of Congress. A
video footage needs to be produced for the much-needed dramatic effect which is a poor girl carrying her white cat in a war-torn
Albanian village that's all filmed right on a Hollywood sound stage.
You'll hear "Why change horses midstream?" often. Abraham Lincoln was famous for it during his re-election which
went like this: "Never swap horses in midstream." The slogan was revived for FDR's two re-elections ('40 and '44): "Don't
swap horses in the middle of the stream."
All in all, Wag the Dog is a funny and ingenious movie, but I really wonder.