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| Oct. 1, 2004. 01:00 AM |  |
Yes Men droll pranksters playing the corporate game
GEOFF PEVERE
MOVIE CRITIC
The Yes Men Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price. 83 minutes. At the Varsity. 14A
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As a profile of two particularly ingenious practitioners of prank politics, Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price's The Yes Men is equally funny and sketchy — like a leftist reality TV show that somehow took on an extra hour and pulled a guerrilla infiltration of movie theatres. But this is the era of Bush-Kerry, Jackass: The Movie, The Corporation, Super Size Me, The Onion and of course Michael Moore (who even makes a cameo appearance in The Yes Men), which is to say an era in which things once considered commercial anathema — like politics, documentaries and anti-corporate dissent — are bankable. So here's the state-of-the-art catch: Because there's currently corporate money to be made from anti-corporate movies, there's room for a little revolution in the multiplex. Over there: Spidey and Tom Cruise. And over here: Che Guevara and two guys creating a public relations disaster for the World Trade Organization. Interesting times.Like a kind of politicized melding of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and Jackass, the entity that calls itself "The Yes Men" — here primarily represented by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno — enter utterly inappropriate environments and remake them according to their own insurrectionary intentions. Initially famous for having set up a phoney George Bush website that was all too brilliantly confused with the real thing, the Yes Men subsequently set up a WTO send-up website that was also eerily like the genuine article. So alike, in fact, that it resulted in Bichlbaum and Bonanno being invited to various international trade conferences to make presentations — as reps of the WTO.And this is what The Yes Men captures: These two cheerfully fearless anti-corporate performance artists doing their thing. In Finland, they appear before a conference on "Textiles of the Future" and model a form-fitting gold lamé "corporate leisure suit" that comes with an obscenely overextended phallic accessory called the "employee visualisation appendage." (Amazingly, no less to the Yes guys as it is to us, there are no questions following the presentation — which includes a ringing endorsement of the use of slave labour.) At the University of Plattsburgh, they horrify a group of students with their plan for a McDonald's "re-burger," made up of recycled human waste, to feed the starving of the Third World. In Australia, they spring a sudden announcement that the WTO is dismantling itself immediately on moral grounds. They even get invited to appear on a European cable-news network service to offer the WTO's view on gleefully unchecked globalization.While the stunts are funny and amazing — particularly for going over as transparently as they often seem to — and the Yes Men themselves are likeable, prime-time-savvy guys, the movie manages to generate as many questions about its omissions as it does chuckles over what it includes. Bichlbaum and Bonanno's pasts are left frustratingly unexplored — just what gives these guys the guts to do this? — and there's practically nothing in the movie that addresses the repercussions of their acts or offers a larger commentary on the feasibility of this post-Letterman prank activism. Not that I'd want to spoil the fun by calling in Noam Chomsky for a soundbite after the poo-burger segment, but Yes Men does leave you wondering just what effect — if any — making fun of people who have no sense of humour can possibly have. Indeed, one of Chomsky's most salient points is that corporate culture is hardwired to absorb criticism and use it to its own advantage, and it applies here: First because the very corporations the Yes Men make fun of don't seem care they're being ridiculed, and secondly because the movie itself is now out there on the corporate market. Or is that a stunt too?Additional articles by Geoff Pevere
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