New Line Cinema, Rated R
Directed by Barry Levinson
Written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet

A truly intriguing plot backed up by some hilarious dialogue is the formula for a great film in Wag the Dog, the first I saw (widely) released in 1998, getting the year off to a great start. The plot centers around a group of presedential aides and Hollywood think-tanks putting together a fake war to draw attention away from a sex scandal in the presidency (which has seen life imitating art in recent weeks). Winifred Ames (Anne Heche), one of the aides, enlists the help of Conrad Bream (Robert DeNiro), a Mr. Fix-It character much like Harvey Keitel's in "Pulp Fiction". Bream, in turn, asks Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a Hollywood irector to help him create the fake war. You see, the Gulf War was apparently also fake, along with many other things we've seen on the news in recent years. Motss decides to make the war with Albania in one of many hilarious exchanges. No one knows where Albania is or anything else about it for that matter. Then some of Motss's friends are brought in to help plan out all the elements of the war, such as the footage of an Albanian girl (Kirsten Dunst) running from rapists and of course, Willie Nelson's theme song. The film is shot in a sort of documentary/cinema verite' style (except for the fact that no one is interviewed), and everything about the film works. There are so many funny lines in the movie, I probably missed many of them the first time I saw it. Hoffman gives a brilliant performance, as does Woody Harrelson as the "war hero". It's a sharp satire of media and politics in the '90s and could also be educational, in that it shows that we shouldn't always believe what we see. ****

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