The Age of Commercialism

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

"The Yes Men" and "The Yes Men Fix The World" are a pair of documentary comedies which follow the exploits of the Yes Men, a group of "culture jammers" who impersonate the identities of those they dislike and engage in "identity correction", a process in which they either behave as the entity really would behave were it not socially bound to maintain some modicum of civility, or behave as the entity would behave were it ethically responsible. In other words, the Yes Men are a group of socially conscious activists who engage in pranks. They con their way into various situations and satirically pretend to be various corporate heads, politicians, bureaucrats and world shakers. Most of their satire flies over the heads of their audiences.And so the two films find the Yes Men pointing out the unethical practises of Dow Chemical, BP, ExxonMobile, Milton Friedman cultists, the world trade organisation, the New York Times, the US Chamber of Commerce, various environmental bodies, various bastions of commerce, various media corporations, and various bodies responsible for the post hurricane Katrina clean up.Most of their pranks start with a fake website, such as their mock website of the World Trade Organisation, which despite being ridiculously blunt about the WTO's unethical practises garnered the Yes Men an invitation to speak at an official occasion. Once in, the Yes Men's representatives then caused havoc before unsuspecting audiences. Thanks to global media, their actions were carried out in full public glare. Other Yes Men stunts involve delineating the principles of free trade by taking such principles to their logical conclusions. Elsewhere they put forward arguments for selling votes to the highest corporate bidder, making the poor eat feces to cure endemic hunger and allowing countries to commit human rights abuses with a system of "justice vouchers" modelled after pollution vouchers. Yet, shockingly, the Yes Men's audiences often show little difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of such ideas. At a CPA meeting (a group of accountants), for instance, the Yes Men exploited the credulity of their audiences by recruiting them into the elaborate fiction of a trade organisation governed by grotesque principles. The two films highlight not only how willingly the public accepts unethical behaviour, but how such behaviour, as it is intimately bound with concepts of success, has long been seen as an ideal to be pursued.Because the Yes Men's cons are difficult to set up and execute, the two documentaries spend most of their time focusing on preparatory work. The actual pranks are few and far between, which will irk those looking for incessant humour. Compared to, say, "Punked", "Borat" or the "Jacka** Movies", these are slow films. Both films also fail to properly/intelligently explore that which the Yes Men rally against. Interestingly, the Yes Men are shown without familial or romantic relationships. Their private personalities are not delved into and they seem androgynous and almost ascetic. Their first two pranks, we learn, involved inserting homosexual activity into a computer game and inserting masculine, warrior voices into female dolls. Their gender-bending, a kind of monastic selflessness coupled to chameleon like amorphousness, echoes the impersonal flux of global capitalism. In theory, they're a parasite which can permeate any situation and counter-bend as readily as capitalism can. In practise, this is perhaps impossible. Even detrimental to their health.While some view the Yes Men as a needed, new breed of activism - of spirituality even - most view them as a mild annoyance engaging in futile efforts. For some theorists, culture and counter-culture are barely distinguishable in an all-pervasive, global culture too ready to incorporate the anti-gesture. Culture jamming, some believe, is rapidly losing political force and the capacity to generate new cultural images and values. On the flip side, the force of the Yes Men's prank comedy lies in the fact that it rises above the abstemious moment of critique and the seemingly noble aim of "enlightening people" and in so doing takes us onto another register. In a time in which global capitalism has such a monopoly on what can be thought, their task seems to be that of enabling something genuinely new to be thought. Their whole image is based on a recognition that affirmation, rather than refusal, is a novel political strategy.8/10 – Worth one viewing.

You might often hear the phrase "You've got to see this to believe it," and although I'm going to risk sounding like a cliché, you need to see this documentary to believe it.It isn't that THE YES MEN is some spectacularly put together documentary that'll blow your mind. It isn't. It's not filmed particularly well, and needed some help in the editing department (lingering on guys working on their computers is about as entertaining as watching paint dry).But the subject matter and the response by supposed "professionals" in the business world were so striking as to be baffling. Let me explain.This is the story of two geeks named Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, The Yes Men. They are antiglobalization activists who've gone extreme in order to get their views across.Initially they set up a website that mirrored George W. Bush's, including placing some rather rude (if not true) commentary about our current Prez on the site. After having enough fun there, the two whizzes set their sights on The World Trade Organization, and put up a mirror site of it, too. But this time they went a bit further. Occasionally businesses from around the world would mistake their fake WTO website for the real one and would send our two pranksters invitations to meet and talk about WTO matters. This included a segment on CNN and then, later, to European countries where they set up outlandish topic discussions (including a huge phallic device used to monitor employees — employees who were somehow connected via slavery by Mike and Andy — and to stimulate certain gluteal muscle groups when things went right or wrong). What was astonishing was the acceptance of this device by the European country in question (sure, they all laughed when they saw it, but they didn't completely dismiss it either!).Our two WTO phonies finally get the response they wanted after visiting a college campus posing as WTO officials and sporting the idea of recycling human waste into poop-patties in order to help feed starving third world populations. FINALLY the college folks understood the mockery and threw things at Mike and Andy.It is a bit disturbing, however, that someone could pull-off such an incredible hoax. The ending, too, is astonishing; our two boys go to Australia and state that the WTO is shutting down and will be reinventing itself in a more humane fashion. This was picked up by numerous news agencies and sent around the media globe! Although interesting, disturbing, and flat-out hysterically funny in many portions, the documentary does lag when it shows our two main guys sleeping, playing with their computers, or other items that really bogged the story down and nearly brought it to a halt. But if you hang in there and watch the entire film, you'll be pleasantly — if not worriedly — surprised.

I think the CONTENT of the documentary was probably valid but the QUALITY of the video was less than that of a home-made one. It was so poor that I could not continue to watch the video which I tried to do twice. And that really disappoints me because I'm very much interested in anything that blows the whistle on the arrogance of international organizations whose self-interested gains appear to be the only reason for their existence.Interestingly, this documentary appeared to be inspired by Michael Moore's work. I think the makers of this one need to be mentored by Moore for awhile yet.

"The Yes Men" features activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno impersonating WTO members and attending conferences to get peoples' responses. With every prank that they pull, they keep expecting the attendees to reject their ideas (e.g., a phallic device for bosses to watch employees from all the way around the world), but the attendees passively accept it. This just goes to show what the WTO is really all about.I gotta say, it's amazing that these guys were able to pull it off. What was really funny was the names that they came up with: Granwyth Hulatbert and Hardy Hank Unruh. And nobody ever checked to see if they were real! The whole thing may seem incredible, but we should take it seriously.