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The Yes Men at Sundance


The Yes Men’s new film “The Yes Men Fix the World” is showing at the Sundance Film Festival. Heraty Law works with The Yes Men in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The screening schedule for Yes Men Fix the World are:
- Sun. Jan 18 2:30 p.m. – YESME18LA Library Center Theatre, Park City
- Mon. Jan 19 6:30 p.m. – YESME19DE Redstone Cinemas, Kimball Junction
- Wed. Jan 21 8:30 p.m. – YESME21LN Library Center Theatre, Park City
- Thu. Jan 22 6:00 p.m. – YESME22WE Tower Theatre, SLC
- Fri. Jan 23 11:15 a.m. – YESME23RD Racquet Club, Park City

THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD (dir. The Yes Men, 2009) is a film for our times. Part screwball comedy about the Apocalypse, part call to arms, it follows two hapless hucksters as they find out how funny an unregulated free market can actually be… and then find the fix.

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take no for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: addressing big business conferences as the corporations they hate the most. Posing as representatives of Halliburton, Exxon, and other big baddies, they parody their corporate nemeses in ever more extreme ways. In quick succession they deploy an exploding golden skeleton, stinky human-flesh candles, and a giant six-foot orb meant for saving corporate CEOs from the fruits of their depredations – all to try to wake up their audiences to what’s wrong with the free-market way.

The speeches in which they present these inventions are as excruciatingly silly, and disturbing, as the inventions themselves. But the truly disturbing thing in the picture is how the business people react. Trying to make sense of this madness, the Yes Men burrow deep into the twisted underworld of the free-market think tanks, finding unexpected (and raucous) comedy in the bowels of the mindset that’s destroying our planet.

Those who watch documentaries in order to learn something won’t be disappointed. As our heroes appear on the BBC before 300 million viewers, or before 1000 New Orleans contractors alongside Mayor Ray Nagin, the layers of lies that we’re used to are peeled back to reveal the raw heart of truth – a truth that ends up giving hope as well as pause.

Hope explodes at the end of this film with a power that may take audiences straight out of the theater and into the streets. A word of warning to theater owners: make sure your seats are securely screwed down.

Bonus: this film has one of the very few underwater ballet scenes you will ever see in a documentary.



posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under 2009, Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, film, movies, sundance, the yes men. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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