Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85388 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-07-29
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Colour, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Wag the Dog (1997) is a rarity: an intelligent, sophisticated and very funny film about American politics. Just before an election the President--in an uncanny anticipation of real life--gets sexually involved with a young woman, leaving spin-doctor Robert De Niro to think of something quick. He enlists Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman to help him concoct a war against Albania to take the public's mind off the President's peccadilloes. Both stars are in top form, with Hoffman particularly funny as the larger than life producer. Scripted by David Mamet (House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross) and directed by Barry Levinson, (whose previous comedies include Good Morning, Vietnam with Robin Williams and Tin Men with Danny De Vito) Wag the Dog manages to make you laugh even while you're thinking about how true the insights are, and how politics is getting more like the media every day.

On the DVD: The so-called platinum DVD is packed with features. There is a series of production shots, assembled in no particular order, some showing the director watching filming on his monitor. There are interview clips with Hoffman, De Niro, Anne Heche, William H Macy and Barry Levinson talking about the film, plus scrolled filmographies. There's an audio commentary on the whole film by Levinson and Hoffman, occasionally rambling but with some interesting insights. In another feature, Macy talks at some length about David Mamet. There are extensive scroll-down production notes giving useful information (such as the film's budget), and finally a 50-minute documentary in which producer Jane Rosenthal talks about the relationship between the film and real-life politics. Her comments are supplemented by such luminaries as writer Budd Schulberg, director John Frankenheimer, newscaster Tom Brokaw and Dee Dee Myers, former White House press secretary. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is good quality, as is the image in 16:9 ratio. --Ed Buscombe

Customer Reviews

delicious satire
This delicious satire is frightening in the way that it requires only slight exaggeration to spin its absurd scenario. A dream cast is headed by Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman, whose characters are so well drawn that you're sure that they're based on specific people even if you're not sure exactly who they are. If there is anything Hollywood types (Barry Levinson directed, David Mamet co-wrote) love better than lampooning politicians, it's skewering other Hollywood types. And here their aim is dead on. A cautionary tale about media handlers, spin doctors, the entertainment biz and jingoistic pop culture, Wag the Dog should be required viewing before anyone is allowed to buy a feel-good song for a popular cause or to tie a yellow ribbon around anything

Too true to be true
Yes the dog needs to be wagged severely by the tail. If politics is nothing but a branch of show business, it is nothing but tall tales and scary stories. In this film they fantasize the re-election of a President based on a Hollywood secret production of a story that sounds truer than reality. The President is going to be accused of some sexual misconduct - read my lips - twelve days before election day, so his advisers invent a war in Albania which is deflated by the CIA who do not like, for once, what is not true. Then they go on with the invention of a US prisoner of war left behind and finally freed and brought home, a Rip van Winkle of modern times. Poor Schumann. A rape-offender who is severely psychotic and who tries to rape the first woman he sees through a diner's window in the middle of nowhere. He ends up killed by the husband of the woman and he is brought back home, directly to Arlington. Superb. Unluckily the producer turns psychotic in his turn and wants the credit for the super production that re-elected the President. So he dies of a massive heart attack on his way to Hollywood, picked by some CIA agents, or is it FBI, and does it have any importance at all? They could have really done the same thing with the war on Iraq. It could and would have been a lot more palatable than it is right now. The film is greatly done though it has little depth and as a comic taste and bitter after taste. Of course it is all a story and it has no truth whatsoever, does it not?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Politics and PR aplenty!
What the last two reviews have failed to grasp is that in terms of American political comedy this is almost alone!
In places you could say that this film is slightly far-fetched, but wait... no, you can't! The spin that we see come out of this country let alone the number one country for media-savvy!
The amazing thing about this film is the premonition that DeNiro's character makes at one point whilst riding in a limo about 'America's next war'. If you want an idea of a worst case scenario for the background operations of an American administration this is the film for you.
I would say that the only thing that could be perceived as being 'unfunny' is the idea that this could be what has happened with the "War on Terror". Watch this film, know what could be happening in "the land of the free".