Wag the Dog

Although the movie Wag the Dog is a comedy about a completly fake war, written and produced by a top Hollywood producer and a presidential Mr. Fix-It in order to take the focus off of a presidential sex scandel 11 days before the election, it does have a serious message to impart - Don't believe everything you see on TV. Sure, parents tell their kids that the man on TV isn't really dead, it's all fake, and we all know that movies and sitcoms and dramas aren't real, they're written and acted. But we believe the shows not labelled fiction. We watch documentries and biographies and absorb the information as the truth. When we watch the news at 6:00 pm every evening, and read the paper over coffee and breakfast, we believe everything reported. And why shouldn't we? Isn't it our right to know what's going on in the world and to not have the struggle of trying to separate fact from fiction? Unfortuantly, we may think this is our right, but we do have to take a more critical look at the information departed from the media.

In this movie a war is created when allegations of sexual misconduct are directed at the president 11 days before the election. Mr. Fix-It, Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) is called on by the President's staff to take the heat off of the President. He comes up with the brilliant idea to create a false war with Albania. "Why Albania?" "Well, what do you know about Albania?" "Nothing." "Exactly." He hires top movie producer Stanley Motts (Dustin Hoffman) to help him with the story and details and to use the endless amount of visual tricks available to them. They create a short grainy news footage piece of a young girl running from her village holding a kitten. She is in fact an actor and running through an empty studio. The kitten, village, and sound effects of screaming and sirens are added in later. This piece is played on the evening news and touches the heart of millions of Americans. They innocently trust what they are seeing