WAG THE DOG

Back when they used to make records out of vinyl, there was a thing called a "45," or a single. For maybe a buck, you could buy one song that you heard on the radio and liked, without having to buy the whole album. On the other side of the 45, there was another song, often a throwaway or something that wouldn't sell on its own, called the B-side. Moviemaking has now adopted this policy.
You would think that Wag the Dog would be the Oscar worthy. It's getting all the acclaim, the Oscar nominations, and it will probably be remembered longer than Sphere, but Hollywood doesn't think that way. They spent more money on Sphere, and, by God, it had better do more business.
Anyway, Wag the Dog is a wonderful, very entertaining, and almost unbelievably timely movie. Robert De Niro plays a kind of super-spin doctor who is hired to get the president out of a sexual scandal two weeks before the election; he comes up with a war on Albania. He hires Dustin Hoffman, a movie producer to take care of the TV work, the songs, the graphics, and the war itself. Anne Heche plays De Niro's nervous assistant.
The fact is, even if it hadn't run into scandals and phony wars, Wag the Dog is still a tremendously smart and funny movie. I doubt it will age as well as Network, but it is close to that realm of brilliance. It has a scrappy low-budget feel, as if this were a team of anarchic students looking to raise hell, rather than some of the finest professionals in the business.
I'm all for it. Normally, all we would have is garbage like Sphere. Now, we have a very good movie as a result of the bad movie. I say to Hollywood, let the filmmakers do the low-budget good movies in exchange for the big budget bad ones. We have a choice as to which ones we will pay to see.

By:Taha Sajid