Surely you've heard that aphorism, about how if you're not a liberal when you're 20, you've got no heart, and if you're not a conservative when you're 40, you've got no brain? Well, I'm a lot closer to 40 than I am to 20, and I just keep getting angrier and more full of liberal-type outrage the older I get. I'll probably turn into Billy Joel's boring-as-hell angry not-so-young man soon, if I'm not there already.

But I'm clearly not alone. The year 2004 produced more than a handful of angry liberal documentaries -- editorials, really, with far more partisan and obvious points of view than your typical newsy flick. Whether by accident or design, these films are countering the balance that has been one-sidedly weighed down by a supposedly liberal mainstream news media that is more interested in toeing the lines of their corporate masters and in catering to an audience it perceives as ignorant and willing to stay that way than in attempting to explain what's really happening in the world. Much of what these films cover will be shocking to those who believe themselves well informed by watching network or cable news.

And speaking of things that really happened and few people seem to be aware of, have you heard how George W. Bush, president of the land of the free, said that "there ought to be limits to freedom"? Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are the guys who prompted him to say that, when they created the parody Web site gwbush.com. Inveterate pranksters, they're also the minds behind the Barbie Liberation Organization, which, a few years back, bought up talking Barbies and G.I. Joes, switched their vocal computer chips, and snuck them back into toy shops in time to be purchased by moms and dads during Christmas rush. Kids and gender activists loved the joke; toy corps were not amused. Their subsequent adventures in yanking the corporate world's chain is exposed here, in The Yes Men, from filmmakers Sarah Price and Chris Smith (Home Movie, American Movie).

"What can't corporations get away with?" is the metaquestion these two were asking, in their months of impersonating representatives of the World Trade Organization, and the answer they came up with is, Not much. To my eyes, and perhaps to yours, their antics are clearly satirical: one of their "projects" calls for feeding the hungry third world human shit, though they call it "post-consumer byproducts"; in another, they propose a Big Bother-esque monitoring system -- which looks, no kidding, like a giant strap-on dildo -- for corporate masters to keep an eye on their wage slaves; often, Bichlbaum appears on television as WTO rep "Granwyth Hulatberi" to make bizarre pronouncements (which are just the WTO's pro-corporate, anti-worker philosophy made plain). They never get caught; no one calls them on their outrageousness, though one group of college students comes close.

It's terrifying, once you start noticing it, how invisible corporate abuse has become: That's the Yes Men's point, made forcefully in this invigorating film. These guys are just plain good for our collective soul -- they're my new heroes. [See their site for their latest pro-reality prank, in which they try to force Dow Chemical to take responsibility for its subsidiary's 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal.]

Morgan Spurlock might be my second-ranked hero of the moment, another modern knight tilting at corporate windmills. Come on: there's no way that any one man, no matter how crazy, could make even the tiniest dent in the juggernaut that is McDonald's. But ya gotta admire the guy for trying, with Super Size Me, his brilliant, subversive documentary about a grand experiment on his own body: eating nothing for an entire month but the comestibles offered at the fast-food chain.

The results are by now well known: Spurlock gained a ton of weight and his body revolted: cholesterol and blood pressure way up, liver on its way to shutting down. His doctors, who were monitoring his experiment regularly, begged him to stop. He didn't.

It has been argued that Spurlock's is not a fair experiment: no one eats nothing but Mickey D's all the time. But are the vast majority of people really cognizant of what -- or how much -- they're eating, anyway? Spurlock's adventure in not-so-fine dining may be extreme, but it makes its point in a shocking way: the food we are surrounded by, all the time, and are exhorted to eat, all the time, is crap. (And as Spurlock notes, whole, unprocessed, not-crap food simply is not marketed to us, not just not in that aggressively fun-lifestyle way that McDonald's is, but not at all.) If you doubt that McDonald's wouldn't love for us all to eat more McDonald's food, then you haven't been watching enough TV.

Spurlock is asking us to think about the insidious ubiquitousness of McDonald's, of the company's advertising and its restaurants, and of its ability to brainwash us into wanting its product. He pukes up one of his early Mickey D meals, but he can still, in all seriousness, later say that he really does enjoy the taste of what he's been eating for a month. Personal responsibility, yea: you're either a dumbass or a documentary filmmaker if you eat nothing but McDonald's all the time. But when there are other stronger, often almost imperceptible factors doing their wormy work on our brains -- Spurlock's detours into exploring how McDonald's markets itself are pretty frightening -- the responsibility we should all be taking for ourselves is being sneakily undermined.

I saw the news today, oh boy
"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality... and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening." So wrote George Orwell of the manipulated people in the world of his novel 1984, and it bears a striking similarity to the current sorry state of civic clued-inness. Hence Orwell Rolls in His Grave, from filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas, about the rampant corruption in the mainstream American media, its complicity in decades of political abuse and fraud, and its stabbing in the back of the concept of independent journalism.

From the early 1980s New York Post whipping up panic over "gas shortages" to the stunning conviction, held by an enormous segment of the American public and fostered by a press that does little to refute it, that Saddam Hussein was complicit in 9/11, Pappas documents how corporate-owned media with "enormous conflicts of interest" turn lies into truth and generate huge private profits on the public airways they monopolize while simultaneously failing to serve the public interest. And they get away with it, partially, because those very same media outlets are in bed with the FCC, the agency that is supposed to be watchdogging them. How's this for scary: FCC head Michael Powell is caught on a video clip here stating, "I have no idea what the public interest is." Betcha didn't see that on Eyewitness News.

Pappas, with breathtaking, take-no-prisoners precision also looks at the even more Orwellian rewriting of history that occurs before our very eyes, as with the shifting justifications for the invasion of Iraq invasion -- from "it's the WMDs" to "Saddam's just a general, all-around bad guy" to "the Iraqi people want us to bring them democracy" -- that go utterly uncommented upon by "journalists" who simply parrot White House press releases and let official spokespeople go unchallenged. For anyone who's really been listening and has an attention span longer than that required to remember what happened on last week's installment of Fox's Bread-and-Circuses DeathBattle for Sex, Cash, and Fame, none of this is news. But seeing it laid out so bare -- and seeing the shamelessness of the mainstream media in pimping it -- is infuriating.

Even more infuriating, though, is the insidious conundrum that faces important films like Orwell Rolls in His Grave, that it must perforce preach to the choir. No one can legitimately claim that anyone is censoring Orwell, because no one is stopping anyone from catching the film at its few small screenings, or from buying a copy of the DVD. But someone who will go to the trouble of seeking out this film is by definition someone who already grasps the gist of it, someone who doesn't necessarily need to be exposed to such powerful, vociferous criticism. Audiences who don't know that something is rotten in the mainstream medium, who are satisfied to get their news from that compromised source, are unlikely to determine on their own that something is rotten. And they're certainly not going to get that newsflash on the six o'clock news. It's a vicious cycle that seems unbreakable -- the best to hope for, it seems, is that a slow spreading of the word through alternative methods may reach a few of the unenlightened. So share a DVD of Orwell with someone who doesn't know they're not getting the whole truth.

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