That’s not an absolute position. If Biden were, say, making noises about invading Grenada again or toppling Panama, it might make sense to say that he’s wagging the dog. But you don’t have to understand game theory on the level of a John von Neumann to appreciate the foolishness of Biden confronting Russia over Ukraine and maybe igniting World War III in the process, just to ascend a few rungs in the Gallup Poll. Likewise, Putin’s willingness to cause trouble to distract Russia is huge. But in the case of Ukraine, preparing for war as a publicity stunt makes no sense. A simpler explanation—trafficked by professional Russia watchers, that Putin’s Ukraine encroachment is about restoring the Russian empire—suffices. Who needs the dog?

Biden isn’t the only contemporary president to be reproached for allegedly wagging the dog. President Bill Clinton got the wag-the-dog scolding from several corners when he launched a missile strike (unsuccessful) on Osama bin Laden in August 1998, said by some to distract the public from his sex scandal. President Donald Trump got it from Senator Elizabeth Warren and others in January 2020 when he had Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani killed. But these theories don’t hold up. Clinton’s approval ratings were high to begin with in 1998, ranging from 59 percent approval to 73 percent, and the strike made no real ripple. Trump’s ratings were low at the time and though they inched up a few points after the strike, there was no lasting effect. Ronald Reagan got almost nothing for his Grenada intervention and George H.W. Bush, already riding high in the polls got only a temporary boost for his Panama adventurism. George W. Bush’s solid approval ratings of 55 percent soared after 9/11, but that definitionally didn’t qualify as wagging-the-dog.

Even if presidents could establish that wagging the dog made political sense in the short term, it’s not apparent that the practice makes sense in the long run. The public tires of war. It tired of Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam and Korea, where military adventurism became a political liability. The only long-term war that enjoyed longitudinal support in the United States during the past century was World War II, and that was not an elective military operation. We were attacked. There are a thousand less-fraught schemes that Biden could attempt short of warring on Putin that would improve his Gallup Poll performance. Could Biden even muster national support for a war with Russia, given our wariness of foreign interventions after the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles? Is there anybody left alive in the country who despises Russia the way we did when it was our Cold War Enemy No. 1? The right wing alone, led by Tucker Carlson and Trump, has done plenty to rehabilitate Russia’s reputation, meaning a plurality of Americans probably wouldn’t respond well to a Biden-sponsored military gambit there.

But what of Putin? In 2018, Washington Post reporter Adam Taylor reviewed the history of Putin’s popularity and political provocations to determine if he had succeeded in translating belligerence into higher ratings. Taylor found that Putin got a little bump in 2008 after invading Georgia but discounts it; Putin’s number was high before the invasion, and post-invasion his numbers fell hard. But in 2014, as Putin seized Crimea, he got a 20-percentage-point lift. But in the eight years since the Crimea annexation, Putin’s numbers have returned to their previous levels. It’s guesswork predicting how a Ukraine invasion might affect his numbers, especially if Ukraine resists. Will it be a replay of Georgia or Crimea?

Finally, if poll numbers inform Biden’s Ukraine strategy, he has recruited some very strange political partners in his Russia resistance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has lined up on the president’s side, approving the administration’s plan to send Ukraine weapons and the deployment of NATO troops. “It appears to me that the administration is moving in the right direction,” McConnell said Tuesday.

If you believe that Biden is really wagging the dog in Ukraine, you will now have to also believe that he has transformed the obstructionist McConnell into his political lap dog. Fat chance of either.

******

“I Wanna Be Your Dog”remains the Stooges’ greatest hit. Roll over and send canine news to [email protected]. My email alerts preach peace in our time. My Twitter feed plugs for peace with honor. The motto painted on the fuselage of my RSS feed A-10 Warthog is “Small Wars and Demolitions.”

By Marianne Garvey, CNN

Updated 1:01 PM ET, Wed January 26, 2022

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We are watching this Chris Nolan film without subtitles, and I have no idea what is going on.

Subtitles are the raft that keeps me afloat from A story to B story. Without them, I am lost. Wandering through a forest without a map. At a Vegas buffet without chafing-dish labels.

In fact, if Zuckerberg developed a way for me to have subtitles implanted into my eye sockets, I would totally forgive him for the whole destruction-of-democracy thing.

It all started when my friends insisted that we watch “Tenet.” I didn’t protest—even though I really wanted to watch “The Lion King.” Yes, I know it was a cash grab by Disney and that the animation looks like uncooked meat, but Beyoncé is in it, so show some respect.

Then my friend Warren said that we should watch the movie without subtitles, as they distract from the cinematography.

Whatever, Warren—we get it. You majored in film, and now you have to constantly remind people of that by shoehorning phrases like “mise en scène” into conversations, because otherwise you’d have to accept the reality that you’re just a boring guy with an office job like the rest of us.

Anyway, now here we are, forty-five minutes into the movie—or are we three hours in? I’ve lost track of time, as well as the topography of my existence—and I haven’t a clue what’s going on.

So I must do what I have never done before—solve the puzzle of this plot without the assistance of subtitles.

The main character just said something important. Why did he have to say it so quietly? Warren looks nervous, so it must be pivotal in some way. Or is that just Warren’s face? Is Warren doing O.K.? Should I be checking in on him? Am I a bad friend?

Oh, shit. Explosion. O.K., it’s definitely the movie and not Warren’s failing marriage that has him stressed.

Wait, Robert Pattinson is in this? How is he in everything? Who is this guy’s agent?

Now the characters are arguing. And yet they’re still whispering. I made out the word “inverted.” That’s something. Now I must use that one word to work out what the hell is going on.

I already asked “What did he say?” twice. I have one more “What did he say?” left in my arsenal before my friends think I’m stupid. I can’t use it yet. I must try harder to understand.

Maybe it’ll help if I turn up the volume. Nice—that’s better. I just understood an entire sentence and FUCK! It’s so loud! Goddammit! There’s a car chase and my eardrums are about to burst. All right, I’ll turn it back down!

Great, here they go, mumbling again. In a British accent, too. Why did we even bother to overthrow the British colonial monarchy if, two hundred years later, I still have to stop myself from eating potato chips so that I don’t miss any dialogue?

As if time travel isn’t already complicated enough, the director had to also Nolan-ify it. Is he trying to get extra credit or something?

That man must be so anxious when he’s writing his scripts. I hope he finds peace and writes an ABC Family rom-com one day with a predictable plot and cliché characters. He deserves it.

Now we are halfway through this movie. Or this is the end. We could honestly be watching an entirely different movie and I wouldn’t know. So what is “Tenet”? That’s a person, right? Although I don’t think I’ve heard anyone call someone Tenet. Maybe they’ll say the word at the climax and the music will swell.

Or, wait, did they already say the word?

And why are they on a boat now? And now they’re in India? I thought they were in Russia? Time is going both forward and backward? Who is that? Who am I? If there were a gun to my head, I couldn’t answer these questions.

Is this movie a prank? It has to be a prank. Warren and my friends seem to be in on it.

Maybe I don’t know the English language as well as I thought I did. Maybe none of us do. Maybe none of us understand anything as well as we think we do. Maybe that’s the point the movie is trying to make.

Oh, shit, did I just understand this movie?

Wow. Turns out that I don’t need subtitles! The subtitles were within me this whole time! Never mind, there’s still an hour left.

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STORY: Mussoorie lad Ishana (Ahan Shetty) falls in love with a local politician’s London-educated daughter Ramisa (Tara Sutaria). While it might appear like a rich-girl-poor-boy love story, as the film unfolds, there’s more to it than that.

REVIEW: Launching a newcomer is quite an arduous task for any filmmaker. While trying to present them in the finest possible way, it’s also crucial that the actor in question is provided enough scope to display his or her wares. The first few seconds into Milan Luthria’s Tadap, and one knows the purpose of the film: to highlight debutant Ahan Shetty’s prowess as an angry action hero who is fuelled by his passion for his ladylove, played by Tara Sutaria. The film is the remake of the 2018 Telugu film, RX 100, which was based on a real incident.

Up to the interval point, Tadap’s narrative makes itself look like a typical love story of a poor boy’s romance with a rich girl, who appears to have been forcefully married off to another mister of her father’s choice. Post intermission, the narrative suddenly has a lot to unpack and it rushes to reveal all that led to lovers’ separation. Ishana’s character graph in the film stays steady throughout — he’s intense, fierce, and deeply passionate. And that is what works for Ahan in his debut film. His effort to internalise an intense character like Ishana in his very first film is palpable. While his dialogue delivery has scope for fine-tuning, Ahan has an impressive screen presence and shows a spark in his debut outing. However, in their bid to present him as a true-blue action-romance hero, the film’s writer Rajat Aroraa (screenplay and dialogues) and director Milan Luthria have focussed way too much on padding it with hefty dialogues, which are almost poetic and stuck in some sort of a time warp, and plot points that don’t service the story effectively.

As Ahan’s adoptive father, who the whole of Mussoorie refers to as Daddy, Saurabh Shukla pulls off his act with ample warmth and conviction. He lends gravitas to this narrative. Tara Sutaria as Ishana’s love interest Ramisa looks gorgeous in every frame – irrespective of whether she’s being playful, romantic, or breaking down. She could have shined more had the screenplay made some more provision for it, apart from a plot twist in the second half. The film falters at the story level, which makes it seem stretched for its runtime. While Tadap feels sluggish pre-interval, it literally wears running shoes in the second half, unravelling dramatic twists and turns, coupled with some heavy action pieces. As a viewer, one only ends up wishing for some parts of this half to have been eased into the first half to create a more gripping watch.

The songs by Pritam are hummable. The cinematography romances Mussoorie as a city – making it look dreamy and beautiful and lending a pretty backdrop to the love story. It’s not troublesome that Tadap is an unapologetic commercial potboiler. But one can’t ignore that it’s filled with tropes and with sequences that make it look jaded for the time in which it’s set. Also, the passion in this love story often fails to stir your emotions, as the writing is unable to hold it together.

To sum it up, while Tadap unabashedly plays to the gallery with action, music, and well-shot visuals, it would have helped a great deal if its screenplay had created some more room for the actors to drive home a more memorable love story.

“I can’t breathe; everything else is alright,” declares Rinku Suryavanshi (Sara Ali Khan), a spirited runaway girl from Siwan town in Bihar, who loves to make a dash — for and from love — as she cranes her head out of a moving autorickshaw in the polluted air of Delhi. This is exactly the problem with director Aanand L Rai’s latest leap of faith. It has an unusual premise, grand scale, big-ticket performers and the moving melodies of A.R Rahman, but the contrived love story still gasps for breath.

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Like Vishwanathan Iyer or simply Vishu (Dhanush), a Tamil medical student from a Delhi college, who is forcibly married to Rinku — under the influence of laughing gas — there is a lot of hot air around a seemingly-complex idea revolving around two men and a woman.

Rinku tells Vishu her heart beats for Sajjad Ali Khan (Akshay Kumar), a magician whom nobody has seen. Vishu is committed to another girl. Both think it would just be a matter of days before they go their respective ways, but as we know, in the universe of Rai and writer Himanshu Sharma, the boy and girl tend to meet under strange circumstances before cupid strikes. But here as the title suggests, things get increasingly weird and outlandish. So much so that by the time it lands on its feet, one has lost patience.

The spectacular premise is rooted in mental illness, but seeks to probe the layers of the heart. It talks of the confusion girls have in choosing between a lover and a husband. It hints at how some girls look for a reflection of their father in their partner. It talks of human vulnerabilities and selfless love. It talks of letting go of the past and embracing the present. A metaphor works in many ways; Rinku could well be the Sita of yesterday or a reflection on the India of today.

Read More | Aanand L. Rai on ‘Atrangi Re’ and his bond with Dhanush: ‘He gets the same love as my daughter’

However, for all these meanings to unravel, the story on the surface has to work. Here, Sharma and Rai, falter once again. Like Zero — their last outing at the turnstiles — in a bid to move beyond the obvious, they have again bloated a beautiful little thought into a contrived mess.

With no clear intrinsic logic in sight, the stereotypes that the script upholds about Bihar and South Indians for a few laughs become all the more glaring. Similarly, its depiction of mental illness is disturbing to say the least. We understand love still has many obstacles in the hinterland, but it is hard to imagine that a powerful family doesn’t try to know the identity of the guy their daughter is desperate to elope with. We know mental illness is still hard to comprehend, but here it has been used just for convenience to further a contrived plot. It seems the protagonist’s friend has been told that he is a sidekick first and a psychiatrist later!

Sara Ali Khan wholeheartedly dives into the role of the perky protagonist, but falters as the material gets dense and is expected to be more than just Chaka Chak, her introductory number. As the elephant-riding magician, Akshay Kumar comes across as a single-trick pony for no fault of his. He has just chosen a wrong vehicle to experiment with his image.

As the medical student who becomes the cure, Vishu is a derivative of the character Dhanush played in Raanjhanaa. His simple, unalloyed charm is once against hard to resist, and it’s his unlikely covalence with Sara that lends meaning to songs like Jaise Ret Zara Si. He instills a semblance of life into the love story and is the reason that keeps you interested even when Rai’s big reveal makes you increasingly frustrated. But even he can’t salvage this weird take on love.

Atrangi Re is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar