January 4, 1998

This Is Nothing

If you see only one movie this month, let Wag The Dog be it.

Today we went to see Wag The Dog. I laughed so hard I cried. If you haven't seen it yet, GO SEE IT. (It may not have opened in your area yet, but when it does, go.)

I love this movie. Dustin Hoffman is great as Robert Evans--"You think this is a problem? This is nothing. Remember on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, three of the horsemen died? That was a problem. This is nothing." (And usually I could do without Dustin Hoffman; cf. the preview for Sphere.)

In case you haven't heard, Wag The Dog is a political satire about the machinations that go into covering up scandals and getting politicians re-elected. Robert DeNiro (also pretty good) plays a political fix-it-man who has to cover up an impending sex scandal involving the President, and he decides to have a war in order to do it.

I thought that they were going to do something with the "Don't change horses in midstream" catchphrase, but they never did.

We finished the unpacking-boxes portion of the Tidy Fest. This does not mean that all the boxes have finally been dealt with--just a lot of them. (The ones that haven't been have been corralled into the dining room.) We went through scads and scads of junk and found things we'd been looking for and a lot more that we hadn't.

We paid to move all this stuff?