THE YES MEN
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
United Artists
Grade: B-
Directed by: Chris Smith, Sarah Price, Dan Ollman
Cast: Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno
Screened at: MGM, NYC, 8/18/04
Are you having trouble sleeping? Try this. Take out your old
Poli Sci 101 textbook and look up WTO. That's World Trade
Organization. Are your eyes glazing over already? Learning
the functions of various national and international organizations
is a cure for insomnia, but look at what Chris Smith, Sarah Price
and Dan Ollman did with those soporific letters WTO! They
filmed Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, prankster/activists,
who set up a web site with the URL http://gatt.org which many
internet readers logged onto and thought that this site was the
official one for WTO. To their surprise, the scam worked far
better than they imagined, as organizations in Sydney, Australia,
Tempere, Finland, Plattsburgh, New York and an international
TV channel booked them, thinking that they represented the
official, public relations stances of the WTO.
When Mike and Andy went to a Finnish textile conference, they
called for reintroducing slavery in order to increase corporate
profits. No one in the distinguished audience seemed alarmed,
as though all believed that, well, if that's what an organization on
their political wavelength, WTO, believes, why not? That's the
least of their scams. Andy donned a management leisure suit,
which he extolled as far more comfortable than conventional
business attire–which got a laugh from the audience–but then,
zoom, a tug at the belt and out came a giant phallus that would
have found a comical home in the Greece of Aristophanes.
Attached to the upper end of said phallus is a small computer
that can spy on workers in the Third World who would have small
chips painlessly implanted into their shoulders. Shocks would be
delivered from thousands of miles away to any who are shirking
their duties. No one in the audience stirred. No one even asked
a question. Why? No, they did not look shocked at all. They
simply assumed that if a stately group like WTO favors this
management technique, sure, why not?
In the funniest scam, they spoke to a group of college students
in Plattsburgh, New York about a plan to recycle hamburgers by
converting the poop of burger eaters in the First World into new,
purified burgers. In that way a single burger could ultimately feed
ten people who are starving in the Third World. This time they
got caught, signifying that college kids know more about the
world than business managers ten, twenty, thirty years older than
they. The kids tossed plastic replicas at the globe at them.
Some walked out.
Michael Moore gets some time by showing a Mexican border
town whose workers were told fifteen years back to feel good
about free trade and globalization. Work for the developed
nations making clothing and whatnot and in a decade or so, all
workers would be driving shiny new cars, they believed. Moore
returned to the town to find it the same tattered slum it was a
decade and half back.
There a problem in the very thesis of these inventive young
scammers. Are they criticizing globalization? For example,
Michael Moore shows that working for whatever pittance the big
corporation pays Mexicans to make shirts has no impact on their
standard of living. They're still slum dwellers. Well then, if an
American company did not set up a plant in the town and thereby
did not offer them jobs, what exactly would the Mexicans be
doing?
Unfortunately Andy and Mike fail to explain the real criticism of
globalism, which is that American corporations are getting
welfare from our government, subsidies that enable them to sell
their cotton or wheat or whatever to Third World countries at a
price lower than what the people in underdeveloped lands could
sell, thereby wiping out local competition.
Then again, is Mike and Andy's aim to show that people will
believe anything provided that information comes to then from
alleged members of prestigious organizations? If they're
exposing The Big Lie technique, so what? How does this impact
on their politically leftist agenda?
Ultimately, "The Yes Men" is an amusing documentary, but alas
is filmed with all the graininess that we've come to expect from
hand-held digital cameras. Andy and Mike could conceivably
give hackers, slackers, and others who are clever with their
computerese to imitate their example with potentially entertaining
results.
Rated R. 83 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
at harveycritic@cs.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38643 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1320717 X-RT-TitleID: 1136342 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123 X-RT-RatingText: B-
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews