Cheap Wag the Dog (Widescreen Edition) (Video) (Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Anne Heche) (Barry Levinson) Price

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Customer Reviews of Wag the Dog (Widescreen Edition)

1) This movie was made BEFORE the lewinsky/clinton scandal but the details were frighteningly similar

2) It told us the war of the future would be against dissident terrorists plotting against the US from camps in some remote country...years before we had heard of al Qaeda, 9/11, or a war in afghanistan

3) Watching Willie Nelson leading the 9/11 Tribute to Heroes telethon in singing "God Bless America" seemed like it was a rip-off of this movie.

To many, the premise of this movie may have seemed absurd when it was released. But each passing year reveals how closer it is to the truth than we think. For a scary, thought-provoking satire of Hollywood and Washington, check this movie out.
If it was a 2002 film, people would say it was a clever satire. That it was made in 1997 qualifies it as an absolute classic.

Who Let The Dogs Out--Hollywood Style
With the lifts in his shoes rivaling in height the moussed masses of his hair, Hoffman plays an egomaniacal Hollywood producer who has done it all, seen it all. "You think this is trouble," he says consolingly to his new colleagues from the White House as ever-worse disasters befall them while orchestrating, on a Hollywood soundstage, a fake military attack against the U.S. "Try having three Italian starlets whacked out on Benzedrine and grappa."

Wag the Dog, a profoundly cynical but also profoundly funny political satire, takes as its starting position that all politics is show business. The military attack, which Hoffman has been recruited to produce by a top presidential spinmeister (De Niro), is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at distracting voters from the real news that, with an election looming, the fictional current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has dallied in his office longer than prudent with a teenage Fire-Fly Girl. Sound familiar? All good satire is rooted in truth.

Sprinting in at only 97 minutes, Wag is a below-the-Beltway comic triumph for director Barry Levinson and his game cast, who shot the film in just 29 days for $15 million. De Niro excels as the shambling shaman, Anne Heche is amusingly uptight as a presidential aide along for the ethical slide, and Woody Harrelson scores with a goofy, unbilled cameo as a pill-popping psycho. But it is Hoffman's toweringly pygmyesque producer (who savvy show business insiders are claiming bears some resemblance to onetime studio head Robert Evans) who is the art and soullessness of the movie.

Quirky political satire worth watching & buying.

This movie was funnier BEFORE we started engineering wars...
Oh dear.

Originaly a parody of the Lewinsky "situation," this movie has grown even more timely since its release. We are currently embroiled in a fake war that this movie definately saw coming: from manufactured heros that don't quite work out (whatever happened to Jessica Lynch anyways?) to theme songs ("Let the Eagle Soar," anyone?) to photo-op battles (the pulling down of Saddam's statue, with the American tanks off-camera so that it looked like it was being done by a mob of Iraqis).

This is a very funny parody that is sometimes subtle, sometimes abrasive, but always hits its target dead on: whether it is the greasy advisors, the complacent news media, or the easily duped American public. Everyone should give it a watch before the next presidential election.