Product Description
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Based on Bakan's book the Corporation: The Pathological
Pursuit of Profit and Power, the film is a graphic and engaging
quest to reveal the corporation's inner workings, curious
history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Direction:
Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar Actors: Howard Zinn, Michael Moore,
Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky Special Features: Janeane Garofolo
interviews Joel Bakan on Air America's Majority Report. 1.85:1,
Anamorphic 16x9, Widescreen format. Language: English Year: 2004
Runtime: 145 minutes.
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An epic in length and breadth, this documentary s at
nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant
institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all
the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you
consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for
only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by
definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a
bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete
the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the
corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber
barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations
not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th
Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.
The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in
exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come
to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a
running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of
a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings
and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an
ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a
demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial
s are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a
cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange
devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is
already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company
leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly
basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly
process.
The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively
and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness
by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky,
Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding
tracking in an infinite patents archive, there's cely an
image worth recalling. Still, it s the new reality. This is
our world--welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson
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Review
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"A monster movie! Smart!Fascinating! The topic is
intricate and global and [the filmmakers] address it with spiky,
dogged intelligence. A dense, complicated and thought-provoking
film!" -- The New York Times
"Fast-paced, highly enjoyable and provocative!" -- The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
"Five stars! A terrific film! Fascinating! Cogent! Compelling!
Powerful!" -- Premiere
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