Friday, October 1, 2004

'Yes Men' has fun taking jabs at the WTO

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

This week's anti-corporate/anti-establishment documentary is titled "The Yes Men," and it's a celebration of two merry pranksters who, for satiric effect, went around the world for a time impersonating officials of the World Trade Organization.

		MOVIE REVIEW
	THE YES MEN DIRECTORS: Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price DOCUMENTARY RUNNING TIME: 80 minutes RATING: R for language WHERE: Harvard Exit GRADE: C+

Their adventure began when the pair of anti-WTO activists set up a lampooning Web site that was mistaken by the gullible world for a real WTO Web site, and even garnered them invitations to speak at various functions as the organization's representatives.

Much of the film is taken up with one particular prank in which they addressed a business conference in Finland, making increasingly outlandish Orwellian statements on behalf of the WTO before finally bursting forth in a superhero costume with a giant erect penis.

In another lengthy sequence, the boys address an academic gathering in the United States on the benefits of recycling American excrement to feed Third World countries, and imply that the audience unknowingly has just had a tasty sample of it. Smile, you're on "Candid Camera."

The movie is undeniably funny in patches, but it's also self-serving, cruel and rather pointless, and you end up suspecting these gleeful publicity-seekers would be a lot better off facing off the WTO with facts, figures and hard evidence of its duplicity.

The best this movie can come up with in that department is a sound bite of Michael Moore telling us that 10 years of NAFTA have done nothing for Mexico. (Really? They say differently. And what about Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore? Has global trade done nothing for them?)

However you feel about the movie economically, it's an intriguing study in human nature. No matter how outrageous the statements made by the Yes Men, no one objects to them -- and it's not clear if that's out of evil, stupidity or politeness. (Though, probably it's the latter.)

"The Yes Men" also fascinates by its very premise: the fact that, on the basis of a Web site logo, these two bozos could so easily pass themselves off as important officials. It's an extraordinary comment on the sea of misinformation that seems to be drowning the Age of the Internet.