The Yes Men: sometimes it takes a lie...

Posted by jossc — 4 August 2009 at 12:01pm - Comments

Yay - the Yes Men have a new documentary out! The anti-corporate activists, who specialise in posing as top executives of corporations they hate on TV and at business conferences around the globe, hit the big screen later this week with "The Yes Men Fix the World".

Described by one reviewer as 'Bruno meets Michael Moore', they put their Hunter S Thompson brand of gonzo journalism skills to good use parodying their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything that they can to wake us all up to the danger of letting greed run our world. On the way they delve deep into the question of why we have given the market more power than any other institution to determine our direction as a society, and investigate the unintentionally hilarious netherworld of free-market think tanks, where they figure out a way to defeat the logic that's destroying our planet.

Not to mention appearing on the BBC before 300 million viewers to announced that chemical giant Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrated, Dow's stock value lost two billion dollars.

They've also managed to get up the noses of the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, who've accused the film of containing "inaccuracies" about their business. Interestingly, the oil giant stopped short of calling the Yes Men outright liars, despite a scene in the new film featuring an entirely fictional new Exxon biofuel called Vivoleum, made from the human victims of climate change.

Exxon's hesitation to fully condemn the Yes Men may be related to the fact that they themselves frequently communicate "inaccuracies"– only theirs have potentially deadly consequences. The Yes Men Fix the World shines a light on some of Exxon's biggest lies, including the way they funded advertising that says climate change is not a problem.

"Exxon Mobil has told lies of a total, criminal world-ending sort" says Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, "and nobody but a psychopath would find them entertaining."

For those who do want be entertained, The Yes Men Fix the World previews on August 7th at the Odeon Panton Street in London, and premieres in 20 cinemas across the UK on August 11th.

Watch the trailer »

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About Joss

Bass player and backing vox in the four piece beat combo that is the UK Greenpeace Web Experience. In my 6 years here I've worked on almost every campaign and been fascinated by them all to varying degrees. Just now I'm working on Peace and Oceans - which means getting rid of our Trident nuclear weapons system and creating large marine reserves so that marine life can get some protection from overfishing.

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