The Yes Men

Just saw this film last week as the closing night film of Human Rights Watch film festival.

These guys are crazy. They travel the globe acting like WTO officials to make their point that if you look like you are in charge, you can say and do whatever you like.

Really got the audience fired up (although was a preaching to the choir a bit since it was a human rights watch event.)

Anyhow - one of the directors and one of the yes men were there for the Q&A.

Was really interesting but went on a little.

The movie is more about the two guys and their adventures than the WTO - so you may want to do some research before you go or go to their site to get more info before seeing the movie.

Not revolutionary but worth the 90 minutes. Has some of the funniest moments I've seen in a long time.

The Yes Men is a brilliant and hilarious documentary by the filmmakers of American Movie. I checked it out at last year's Toronto film festival.

The film centres around a small group of anti-globalization activists who went around the world posing as WTO representatives at major industry conferences. Their appalling presentations were often met with applause by world business leaders.

The only problem is that the documentarians mentioned they did not have promission to shoot what they were filming and thus are having a difficult time getting the rights to the images from the conferences they were at. It would be a real shame if The Yes Men was not allowed to be released in theatres.

This shows how some of the bizarre scripts written by well meaning but now largely irrelevant organisations have been become so muddled that many of the audience don't realize the joke is on them. With a few notable exceptions the America we see on our daily news has had an irony bypass already and forget satire so it is great to learn that the artform is not lost by the Yes Men.

NZ's very own former PM and trade minister most famous for "lamb burgers" and (sincerely convinced WTOer) Mike Moore gets a photo shot early in the film when a WTO site is shown. He is followed closely by the other Mike Moore who is much better known but wasn't really needed in the film.

The remote workers viewing device (phallus) had our festival audience in apoplexy and deserves to be shown widely especially the animated sections.

On the whole though it was refreshing to think that a few clever protests with careful thought and some talented execution can create ripples on the pond so wide that millions of people have now seen the echoes in a media format somewhere near them.

In a world where individual action often seems puny it was great to see it is still possible to be funny and absolutely relevant and tactical without being boring.

The Yes Men is a documentary about a group of anti-economic liberalization activists who have made a unique habit of impersonating the WTO and other right-wing organizations (including the George W. Bush presidential campaign) in talks and national media spots. They try to get noticed by the overblown repugnance of the right-wing plans they suggest for the world's poor. If Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was a satirical short story about the rich literally devouring the impoverished, these guys are the long running Broadway adaptation.

Despite the release of the movie and many high profile performances, they still have not been properly outed, which is good for their continued success since still nobody recognizes them, but part of their aim is to get people who would normally listen to the WTO talk start thinking about globalization and its human consequences in the third world (poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, increased political and domestic violence, environmental destruction, and so on).

Since it's a documentary normally I wouldn't be lauding performances, but in this case, these guys do perform for their audience, and they are absolutely wonderful. They propose such things as recycling human waste to be made into McDonald's hamburgers to be sold in the third world. To see them advocating the employment of sweatshop workers because it's more humane than slavery and MUCH more cost effective (since "involuntarily relocated workers" require room and board at American rates and in the third world you can employ dozens for the same price and you don't have to look after their health or recoup the costs of transporting them overseas if they "escape"), while nobody listening bats an eye, is hilarious (if horrifying). They take the best of Michael Moore, The Corporation, and Supersize Me and sneak it in under the noses of the world's economic and academic elite at conferences on globalization.

I was lucky because the filming ended in 2002, but the proprietors of the theater where I saw it downloaded their latest prank off webcast, which featured a Yes Man impersonating a spokesman for Dow Chemicals speaking on the Bhopal massacre, which was easily equal to anything else they'd pulled off, and played it at the end of the movie.

I saw this hilarious and very entertaining film at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year. Very refreshing look at the 'WTO' and its side kicks from an inside point of view. A subversive political documentary with a sense of humour in the vein of 'Bowling for Columbine'. All the travel, costuming and filming were done with the smallest budget and the 'actors' just two guys who want to reveal a few things about how stuff gets done in the US of A! During the Q and A someone asked a question about the legality of using some of the clips and whether they had permission to film the conferences.

It was clear that all these issues had been covered and the film releases this autumn in Europe as far as I know.