eturning
for a second feature-length tilt at gleefully executing anti-corporate
hoaxes, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno follow up the inflatable penis
suit and feces-generated fast food of
The Yes Men
with a little more showbiz (staged comic interludes in their
debris-filled "underground headquarters") to prank unsuspecting
business conferees with fraudulent rollouts of a bulbous rubber
survival cocoon (ostensibly from Halliburton) and a new energy source:
candles made from the flesh of a gallant, industrially-poisoned Exxon
janitor. Proving repeatedly that a passable wardrobe and camera-ready
clichés can get them into any chair normally reserved for experts and
bureaucrats, the Yes Men most satisfyingly bring temporary but
unaccustomed chaos through a BBC News interview where Bichlbaum's offer
of Dow Chemical billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical
disaster sends the company's stock plunging; the post-catastrophic
"SurvivaBall" garb draws straight-faced questions about marketability
and long-term wear; and a
New York Times print parody exploits
Obama-victory ecstasy by trumpeting headlines of instant Iraq
withdrawal and sweeping progressive reforms. (This climactic project,
though accurately conceived and read as a "dream paper," may have dated
fastest of all.)
Even more so than in the previous film,
The Yes Men Fix the World
indulges in faux-naïve disappointment that, after garnering priceless
double-takes of white-collar audiences confronted with the "Golden
Skeleton" of monetary human-life calculus or the hypothesis that global
warming can be as positively transformative as the Black Plague was in
clearing the decks for the Renaissance, the duo hasn't shamed The Man
into changing his deregulated, market-dictated ways. Given that
Bichlbaum and Bonanno aren't above funny cheap shots like
green-screening Tom of Finland art behind a solemn Milton
Friedman-school economist, their exposure of ossified free-market
mindsets seems more in line with their skills than a call to activism
against a global capitalist oligarchy. Careful to elicit blessings upon
their deceptions from the downtrodden, be they health activists in
Bhopal or the post-Katrina poor being squeezed out in money-mad New
Orleans reconstruction plans, the Yes Men ultimately admit to "failure"
to fix the world except in the pages of their utopian
Times,
but their true success comes in discovering a Gulf Coast-rehab expo
where the only shelters being marketed are yurts from Kyrgyzstan, or in
getting a climate-change skeptic to offer, "Cold-related deaths will
decrease significantly."