Wag the Dog Movie Review

In 1997 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. There were message boards, email, websites, maybe some very early blogs, but the dissemination of information and access to reports, accounts, and testimonials, for all that we thought at the time was lightning fast, was nothing compared to today. This thought occurred to me while revisiting Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s seventeen-year old film about an invented war fed to the media to distract the public from a Presidential sex scandal two weeks before he hopes to be reelected. In it, Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a kind of independently contracted fixer brought into the White House by Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to help clean up the mess and potential fallout once the story breaks. So Conrad enlists the help of Stanly Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a big Hollywood producer, to put the pieces in place to sell not just a war, but a whole package and all the emotions and patriotic fervor that come with it, to the public.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1987

David Mamet's first film as director was House of Games, one of the great films about confidence men.

Before Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to the Oscar for Best Director, she once directed a cult vampire film called Near Dark starring Bill Paxton.

The late 80s saw a string of films similar to Like Father, Like Son, in which two people change bodies for a while. In this one medical doctor Dudley Moore and his son, a high school track runner played by Kirk Cameron, accidentally exchange minds after ingesting an Indian potion of some sort.

The Untouchables Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

In honor of this film's 25th Anniversary, here's a fresh look at a film I've seen several times before, but not in many years.

Kevin Costner was not yet a box office superstar when he landed his first big role in Brian De Palm’s The Untouchables, playing the Treasury Department golden boy Eliot Ness, the law man who got Al Capone. He was so much not yet a star that the first shot of him in the film he has his back to camera for the majority of the scene. It is his wife Catherine, played by Patricia Clarkson in her film debut, who gets all the face time in the scene. This is actually the second scene in the film following the bombing of a Chicago business establishment by one of Capone’s henchmen, the blast taking a 10-year-old girl as collateral damage.

From My Collection: State and Main Movie Review

Robert Altman’s brilliant 1992 return to form The Player gets all the ink when it comes to Hollywood satire. It is a fantastic piece of work – suspenseful and darkly comic. But re-watching State and Main, David Mamet’s comedy about a Hollywood production that tears apart a small New England town, I realized this has to be ranked as one of the great satirical films. What makes it more remarkable is that Mamet was primarily known for his thrillers, set up as complex confidence games. Although it was not nearly as much a departure as his 1999 film The Winslow Boy, a G-rated period piece family drama about a boy accused of theft at his school. State and Main is as biting and funny as his great screenplay for Wag the Dog, a satire of the political process.

Hannibal Movie Review

This review was written in February 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

There is an unfortunate stigma that comes with sequels: the belief that it must be as good as or better than the earlier film in the series. Comparisons are always inevitable in such cases, but if a sequel can stand on its own, why is that not good enough? I've always maintained that the third installment in the Godfather series would be an excellent movie had it not been the third in a series of fantastic films. Hannibal, the sequel to 1991's critically acclaimed Silence of the Lambs, now faces the task of being measured against its predecessor.