Wag the Dog

Movie: Wag the Dog (1997)
Watched with: Angelo

Bah.

You can tell that the people who made this thought they were so damn smart for their "biting satire" of the Clinton administration (and, to a lesser degree, the first Bush administration).

I guess it does a competent job of skewering its subjects, and the dialogue has a good clip (and is well-delivered), but once the premise is established, the plot goes nowhere that isn't obvious, and nothing creative or insightful happens.

The best political satires (say, The Manchurian Canidate) work long after the specific situation which bore them has faded away.

The worst ones generate a lot of buzz when they come out, and are tedious and useless a decade later.