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    we'd call it blackmail..., 2005-06-14 14:31:34 | Main | all that what for fer what?..., 2005-06-15 14:26:48

    the corporation:

    in the range of political polemic/documentary in the past year I've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, Control Room, Outfoxed, Gunner Palace, Team America: World Police, Going Upriver, and the corresponding anti-Kerry Sinclair/PAX Network's "Stolen Honor", endulging as I went tales of missing POWs which continue to propagate across the spectrum to poison the few barely tolerable blowhard Senators left in the country.

    Of the lot Control Room was probably the most interesting, as either documentary or polemic. "Outfoxed" was underwhelming, where Control Room focused on one network's operations Outfoxed was a diatribe against a political viewpoint absent any sympathy. Team America was brilliantly entertaining but had no substance - anybody with an opinion is a douchebag, I get that. Gunner Palace was straight documentary and left me with little not readily garnered from reading the print coverage: our troops are terrific, often amazing, and sad individuals and their leaders have honored their service and sacrifice by at best being perfectly aimless. The Kerry-graphs sucked, all in all. Frontline's biography of the two candidates in chronological sync was infinitely more distrubing and inspiring than the other two could ever hope to be. As a trend I always leave Michael Moore's films infuriated with the absence of coming away with anything, and F911 just reinforced that. The arguments, where they actually existed, were unsubstantial and the rest of the film floats away like Columbine did when Moore left Charleton Heston's factoid about inner-city gang violence hang above the previous hour and a half of film like a cartoon piano, uncountered and unencountered.

    So I haven't been that excited about seeing The Corporation. There were a few screenings in Chicago I kind of wanted to make but it was brief and I didn't go. For the past couple of months I've seen it at the video rentals and it's always been checked out, which was maybe a good sign, at least. I eventually just downloaded the goddam thing and was really quite blown away at how good it was.

    It's an actual documentary, and it raises serious discussion. Anti-corporate shibboleths like Moore and Chomsky are interspersed but so are honorable defenders of the corporate system. It's educational, demonstrating a great deal of sympathy for those one assumes are going to be the target of much vitriol, spending much of the first hour informing such callous anti-corporate ideologues as exist at the same time as it drags all parties towards the table for dialogue, providing many case files demonstrating how such is possible. Much of the commentary is provided by ostensible corporate whores, commenting on the system in which they work and have expertise, along with an assortment of defectors from the system. All in all it's all so shockingly reasonable. A few good laughs, for that matter, I'll never look at those wierd multi-ethnic wanta wanta fanta fanta commercials quite the same, and despite my excessive indulgance of a certain legal depressant beginning with a W I came away with an equally certain sense of hope.

    I'm buying a copy. It ought to be viewed more widely, which is a simple two to five point procedure, pending circumstances:

    1. If you have no reason not to just buy it.
    2. Download this torrent file.
    3. Find and download the appropriate bittorrent client for your operating system.
    4. Open the torrent with the application you just downloaded. Wait for it.
    5. Then try downloading an incredibly efficient, multi-purpose, multi-platform media player, find out you won't be able to for long, and realize its all come full circle as you're viewing pleasure just became another externality to somebody else's profits.

    Outside the opening sequence where there's a brief, burnishing comment by George W. Bush about bad apples, the movie could have been made five years ago or five years from now. It probably has a longer shelf-life in it than the rest of these films combined.

:: posted by buermann @ 2005-06-15 02:34:28 CST | link

      Have you seen The Revolution Will Not Be Televised yet? If not, and you're interested, you can get a copy here:


    posted by diane @ 2005-06-16 18:15:07 | link

      Thanks, I haven't watched it yet, but did go on a spree downloading a pile of bittorrent-distributed documentaries and that was in there. I'll get to either that or this Naomi Klein one next, though I admit I'm really looking forward to "Global Governance - The Quiet War Against American Independence", featuring such luminaries as John Ashcroft and Grover Norquist ;)

    posted by buermann @ 2005-06-16 21:22:09 | link

    go ahead, express that vague notion

    your turing test:

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