Wag the Dog

I recently watched Wag the Dog starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro; the plot of this movie follows two men as they stage a war to boost the Presidents rating fourteen days before the election. This movie shows the government is capable of covering up scandals and problems in the world by simply creating false news to feed to the general public. While this movie is a comedy there is a certain level of fear that consumes some audience members because this movie makes it seem incredibly easy to misguide the American people. Imagery is a central issue in this movie because people are coming up with ways to tap into the human psyche in order to fool them into endorsing a fake war. The use of Kristen Dunst as the poor Albanian child with a cat showed the sensitive side of Americans and the amount of effort Dustin Hoffman and his team went through to create Dunst’s image illustrates how a much impact a single can have on regular people as well as how each distinct aspect of her appearance can create a large range of emotional responses.

Wag the Dog

"Wag the Dog," A 1997 film directed by Barry Levison and written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, is a satire of American politics, media, and war. The film takes place as an unnamed and unseen president up for re-election is caught in a sex scandal with a young girl only fourteen days before election day. As the news of the president's scandal starts to leak, an adviser named Conrad Brean played by Robert DeNiro is brought in to create a diversion in order to save the president's re-election bid. By teaming up with a Hollywood producer (played by Dustin Hoffman), Conrad and his team create a fictional war with Albania. A media campaign is created complete with a theme song and heroic soldier figure, effectively obscurring the president's scandal and ensuring his reelection. Ultimately, Wag the Dog is a disturbingly satirical look at how war is portrayed in the modern media and how it can be manipulated and propagated to a population. The film also has disturbing similarities to both the Clinton impeachment scandal as well as the media coverage of the beginnig of the Iraq war. What makes the film all the more profound is that it was filmed and produced before both of these events, making the film seem not so far-fetched. The satire of the film and its exaggerated nature make it at once humorous, eye-opening, and disturbingly plausible. Overall, Wag the Dog is an essential film for anyone interested in politics and war and how they are presented and skewed in the mainstream media.

Here's a clip from the film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-FXkj-r9Mc

Racism part 1

For the next blog post this administrator has watched Miracle at St. Anna directed by Spike Lee in 2008. Personally I thought this movie had a horrible plot with tons of holes in it. Up until the end the movie I would have recommended it to my friends but within the last ten minutes I lost all faith in the movie. However, that is not what I wish to focus on for my blog, instead I want to discuss the issue of racism and war.

This movie follows the story of last four survivors from a black regiment in World War 2; they get stuck in a small Italian village while they wait for back up from the rest of the company a few miles away separated by a large platoon of Germans. The issue of racism comes up frequently and the audience is able to see three different perspectives on the black involvement in the war. The Germans would feed lies over intercoms beckoning soldiers to join the axis side, and yet the Germans displayed an incredible amount of hatred towards the Blacks not to mention they were attempting to create a master race. The white Americans show a level of contempt for the black soldiers and consider them to be lesser soldiers than the regular white infantrymen. In one of the first scenes a white commander disregards the needed artillery to support the black troops under fire because he is convinced they are lying because they were not white and there for could not be that far into enemy territory. Finally, we are shown the Italian perspective which is much better than the other whites in the movie. At first they are fearful of the black soldiers but they eventually warm up to the soldiers. One small child befriends one of the soldiers to the point where he begins to act as the child’s guardian.

The army was not desegregated until 1948 and this movie shows the audience the hardships faced by the black soldiers in WW2. Spike Lee shows how these soldiers were mentally and physically abused when they simply were trying to defend their country, a point that is frequently up by the soldiers.

My next post will be about the movie Glory, a civil war movie about a Black regiment, and I will compare the two movies and their representation of the black soldier.

Response: "King of Hearts"

King of Hearts is a 1967 French film set in small French village at the end of World War I. Alan Bates portrays Scottish Private Charles Plumpick sent on a mission to detonate explosives set in the village by the retreating German army. He arrives to find the town deserted and mistakenly lets loose the remaining citizens from the local "lunatic asylum." The patients of the asylum take control of the town and name Plumpick their king. He is then faced with the decision to join the mentally challenged in their blissful world or carry out his mission. Plumpick's struggle is surrounded by a surreal and visually beautiful array of characters from the asylum. At its root, King of Hearts is an absurdist questioning of war. The new inhabitants of the town are completely naive to the conflict of the outside world and don't care to learn of it. Surrounding this isolated group are the German and Scottish armies who are portrayed as equally insane and farcical as the lunatics that briefly control the town. This juxtaposition brings out the undertones of war and impending doom which make the film a poignant and beautiful satire of the absurdities of war and conflict. King of Hearts is an entirely unique portrayal of war and one that is strikingly different from most war films or war satires produced in the United States.

Here's a link to the trailer:
http://www.spout.com/films/King_of_Hearts/19001/353977/trailers.aspx

A Taste of What is to Come

This is the first post for our spectacular blog and I thought it would be appropriate to look at a movie that everyone is familiar with, Saving Private Ryan. This WW2 masterpiece has become one of the greatest war movies ever made, but I ask you why that is the case? What made this movie so much better than any that had come before it? People first point to its realistic representation of the war and how meticulous each detail of the movie is. The sound effects and some of the props used came from actual World War 2 battles. However, my interest in this movie spawns from the horror and trauma it shows the audience. This war is one of the bloodiest in the USA’s history but people tend to over look that because of the patriotic notions that revolve around this war. Yet this movie makes an effort to show the audience how traumatizing this war was and how the soldiers were forced to witness bloodshed far worse than any man should endure. In the first twenty minutes there is a brutal scene in which countless men are gunned down and there are multiple images of dying men excreting gallons of blood. In one shot the audience can see a man holding his intestines in his hand, an image that most patriotic movies would not show to enforce the victory in WW2. This movie has gone down in history because it showed the world the brutality of war but at the same time the pride of fighting for one’s country. Saving Private Ryan showed people the honor of war and the sacrifice asked of soldiers and their readiness to give their entire being to a cause they might never live to see achieved.