The Corporation Directors: Jennifer Abbot, Mark Achbar Zeitgeist Video 2003 Everyone has a friend who constantly complains about life, and after a while, you just want to shake him and shout, "Well maybe you can do it better." This is how it feels watching The Corporation. It's an extremely well-executed, edited documentary and the complaining friend within it is scarily effective and difficult to counter. After finishing the film, you won't know whether to jet out the door with a makeshift picket sign like it's the new '60s, or crawl under your covers from Target and cower in the dark with a flashlight your mom unknowingly bought at Wal-Mart via China. This doc is nothing short of terrifying, so impressively epic in scope you feel like an insect with pointless feelings, like Antz . But The Corporation is still similar to many activist-minded documentaries (not to mention books and editorials) as it leaves behind an unsolved mystery mountain of questions and answers. This film is out to more-than-define the modern corporation and everything inherently, perhaps, genetically, wrong with it. Along its analysis, various directions are followed to their dead-end tunnels - topics like chemical spills, the corporate-controlled media, and the privatization of water. As far-reaching as it is powerful, it should be impossible for anyone with a soul to feel completely assured - when it's this difficult to admit that present reality is dubiously askew you're kidding yourself.   Through interviews with everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to Harvard professors to Michael Moore, the filmmakers build a case against corporate mind-set and the alleged global tyranny it brings to life. The interviews are backed by a great, intense original score and are scattered with stylish reenactments and campy corporate videos, giving The Corporation a visual, Power Point-gone-personable feel and smooth pace. Weighing in at almost two and a half hours, the film is interesting, fresh and coldly molded in the exact mathematical anxiety formulas found in the minds of amusement-park architects and privatized psychiatrists. From an entertainment standpoint, even people who aren't willing to invest thought will chill and listen, and for those who are willing, The Corporation is mentally and emotionally devastating. Whether it's footage of Third World (a term this film destroys into one foreboding singularity) sweatshops or pesticide-mutated animals, the film never backs down or eases up. Yet, unlike a top-notch expose by Eric Schlosser like Reefer Madness , where answers aren't stillborn and you can simply think-twice about McDonald's or compromise with the mainstream infiltration of pornography, this work is almost nihilistic, failing to provide solutions that level up to one-tenth of the multitude of the problem it presents: Our Foundation is simply Self-Serving and Caput. A tacked-on epilogue and its list of helpful websites (websites!) does little to give us hope at the end: we are doomed. An upcoming part-non-fiction-part-pre-cog book called The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntsler seems to trade similarities in view, but apparently concludes that while humans will positively bounce a couple of rungs down the ladder of self-importance in the next few decades, the Earth is hardly our "but he loves me" bitch.   The Corporation 's cool propaganda panic is instigated not from tackling global or even national issues, but by well-thought acupuncture, tapping many local, immediate problems consecutively; for instance, the potentially cancer-causing bacteria having a party in Florida's steroid-induced milk supply (which as you know, caused a local media uproar, and that goes back to corporate-controlled media et al.). Despite being apologetically one-sided and offering one answer (called redemption), The Corporation is not preachy, and unfortunately, most likely ahead of its time. Take your Zoloft and Klonopin, it's one of the most depressing movies to come along in quite a while and also one of the most important. We're in for quite a ride and the tickets have long been purchased in bulk.    - Shawn Wines Back Next