Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Why so much hype?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Part 1 of The Corporation is the build-up. You listen to them talk about the origin of corporations, and notions like sense of community. You're sympathetic, but at times it seems a tad too idealistic, and moralistic, and vague.Then Part 2 starts, and all the threads regarding corporate greed and destructive nature come together, and it's like someone front-kicks you in the solar plexus full-force, because the sudden and total horror of it all makes it hard to breathe. You realize where Part 1 was going with all of its sentiments, and it's a shock. There are a couple of moments when it seems like you can see all of social reality as the true Hell.What really got to me was the patenting of human and other genes by corporations. Did you know about this? In a nutshell, in 1980 an industrial chemist went to patent a microbe he cooked up in a lab, and after a brief fight, the judges, - obviously ignorant of stuff like biology, but authorized and ready to make rulings on biological issues nonetheless, - ultimately allowed this. After that, for more than 3 decades, companies in USA have been busy cutting out bits of the human genome, and getting patents on individual genes. Yup, it's insane, I know. The most they do is cut out the introns (extra bits interspersed with the gene) - and then say: "We own this". Well, imagine that companies would have patented organelles in human body cells when scientists first gained the capability to go that small? Patenting of genes is the same thing! (I'll do a small October 2014 update for you: The only small consolation is that The Corporation was made in 2003, and a decade later, - in 2013, - the US Supreme Court finally ruled that individual genes cannot be patented. The reason: the company Myriad owned patents on certain cancer-related genes, and was therefore the only entity legally allowed to work with those genes in ways like running prophylactic tests. Neat, right?However, the Supreme Court judges still showed considerable ignorance of the issues, - souring the potential victory of common sense in the ruling, - because they added: "cDNA can be patented...cDNA does not present the same obstacles to patentability as naturally occurring, isolated DNA segments." Just so you know: cDNA is simply a type of copy of genetic material. So essentially there is a door-sized loophole in the ruling that potentially renders it pointless. The Myriad stockholders, for example, celebrated upon hearing the verdict.Be informed. This theme might affect you and your family members and friends, should the horror of cancer suddenly become relevant for you... and thanks to our world being poisoned with chemicals, the chances of that are rising fast.) This is just one of the absolutely infuriating examples examined in The Corporation. They also talk about corporate whistle-blowers, Nazi-business collaboration, child labor, and so on. Trust me - you need to know this stuff, because the prevalence of narrow-minded, short-sighted behavioral patterns among mankind's leaders concerns every being on the planet in a profound manner. 100/10.

The corporation itself is a dichotomy, namely because despite what is wrong with these entities (the film proves that they have all of the characteristics of a psychopath), these entities are responsible for the lifestyle that we currently have. To be honest, to remove the economic institutions and return to the era of the cottage industry and the local store owner is going to end up driving up prices and undermine our current lifestyles.That does not necessarily mean that it is good for us to live luxurious lifestyles that we are living in the west, particularly since our lifestyles are supported on the backs of slaves. While they may not be slaves in the literal sense, they are slaves in the economic sense, living on less that two dollars a day and working extra-ordinary hours in horrendous conditions. Despite the fact that many of the senior executives of these corporations (as well as the shareholders, which include any of us who have a pension fund) pretend that we don't know how these goods are being made, or the conditions that the workers are working in, in reality we wish to remain wilfully blind to the reality of what is going on.Granted, I may not own a car, and resist the temptation to buy things that are not needed, I still live a life of luxury, and the fact that I can jump on a plane and fly to Europe and back, is testament to that. There are people that I work with that to them such an adventure is little more than a pipe dream, and I am not even earning big bucks, however relatively speaking, because I have no dependants and no debt, I have a much higher disposable income than many other people that I work with, even those who hold higher positions than I do.There are a few things that come out of this movie that I wish to explore, and one of them is the corporation as the externalising machine. Externalising is the art of making something somebody else's problem, despite the fact that you are the cause of that problem. For example, when a corporation dumps all of its toxic waste into the river, and lets the government and the community deal with it, then it is externalising waste management. It is too expensive to actually deal with it properly, and the laws that prevent it from doing such things are weak, or even non-existent, that the most cost effective way to deal with waste is to externalise it.Labour is another thing that is externalised, and one way to do that is to contract out certain areas so that the corporation can cut back on labour costs and not have to feel responsible for how products are used. In fact, where in the past a corporation was defined by what it made and in turn sold, this is pretty much disappearing as we speak. Nike do not make shoes, they contract that out to some sweatshop in Indonesia which is not even owned by them. Instead, they buy the shoes, and then sell the shoes, either direct to the consumer or through an intermediary. As such Nike is no longer a manufacturer of shoes, they are simply a brand that makes money by being a middle man. However, it is not even that by contracting labour to the sweatshops that the product becomes cheaper. The price of the product actually stays the same, it is just the profit that the corporation makes increases (and even then there is no guarantee that the shareholders will ever see any of that profit. Instead they will keep the profits, which no doubt will result in an increased share price, and even then the shareholder must know when to sell (which is nigh impossible) to maximise their investment.What we need is not to get rid of the corporations, because at heart we need them to be able to maintain our extravagant lifestyles. However, what we do need is a paradigm shift, within ourselves and within our society. We have to begin to learn to be content with less. The Socialists are right when they say that even if we live in a country like Australia, we must still remain vigilant less the freedoms and the laws that we have here are undermined by corporate greed. However, how many of us live in houses with electricity, and how many of us watch television. Can we go without our laptops or our mobile devices, because it is our desire for these things that keep the corporations in control. Granted they make our lives easier, but at what cost? Even if climate change is not a man made phenomena, the pollution that is spewed into the air, and the toxins that are pumped into our water supply are having a significant impact upon the world in which we live, and to be honest with you, it is unsustainable.We may wonder if there has ever been a similar period in history like our own, and my answer is that on one hand there hasn't been one, but in another there has. The period I point to is that of the mid to later Roman Empire, where people were living such luxurious lives that they blinded themselves to the ecological destruction that they were causing. It is not simply that either, because inflation was running rampant, and while the rich were getting richer, the basic necessities of life were unreachable by the masses. Rome ended up collapsing, and with it creating a dark age of epic proportions, and that is something that even now we are also looking at.

Is a corporation indeed psychopathic? Does the Store manager really not know what the associate is doing? Is the cause of this the policies, and procedures that do not allow things to be of clear communication? I did not find this story to be shocking in anyway. Of course a corporation does not know everything about all things that run inside of it - at all times. An incorporation or a corporation is not a human being, it is an organizational structure. How can an organization be marked at a psychopath? It is like analyzing the architecture of a building to be one of deceit or honesty - based only on the way the bricks lay and the glass windows are formed.An institution is not a human being and should not be compared to one. An institution is a fake structure in which human beings operate in order to perform a task and gain financial results in order to live on this planet - in order to pay bills and support life.Perhaps operating within the corridors of an institution and a corporation is frustrating however it is the only system that human beings know that works efficiently.I believe the movie, "The corporation" does indicate how some of them work. However I think it is easy to see the wrong a corporation does - however, every corporation has good and bad parts in it. I think it would have been better to have focused on an actual case study of one large corporation and analyzed it from each layer within the company. From associate to store manager to head-office. The devil is in the details, however - as a whole - as a big picture - the corporation system gains financial results as seen in profits - which in turn builds to the ever success of capitalism.I believe that each person in the corporation machine encounters things that can have the traits of a psychopath - however those are tiny details in the big picture of gaining profits, surpassing the predicted bottom-line results and gaining success.

Joel Bakan, who served as a clerk for Chief Justice Brian Dickson and advocated for human rights against governments, now takes aim at corporations in this documentary. On the way he gets a little help from friends like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore. The stuff exposed in the final product can be shocking and hits home even if the presentation is fairly one-sided. From stuff little-known like businessmen trying to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and aiding Nazi death camps, to a reminder of Kathy Lee Gifford's sweatshops. It questions the ethics of applying patents on life and rain water. This is a story that needs to be heard, even if it needs to be balanced.I first saw most of the movie as part of a sociology course. We considered the concept of a corporation as a person, and how if it were a person it can fit the definition of a psychopath. While it may sound extreme to apply that label to men running businesses, sadly there is some truth to it. Even if this movie doesn't convince me corporations should be banned, it demonstrates why they should not have absolute power and personhood. The stuff about Bolivia having a revolt shows people being pushed can push back, and raises questions of how we may see more of that which is alarming from a security perspective. All of this is helped by use of metaphors and pop culture and the calm, female voice of the narrator. Everyone shaping a national economy should see this movie.