The Corporation

Buy This Item The Corporation by Zeitgeist Films  Available from Amazon  $24.99  on 11-27-2008     An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims 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 <I>persons</I> under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.<p> <I>The Corporation</I> 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 chemicals 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.<p> 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 shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it. <I>--Richard T. Jameson</I> Reader Reviews The Corporation comes across as preaching to the converted and fails to expose any new information on the subject. This would be better presented as a documentary on the evils of several large corporations (Wal-Mart, Shell, Exxon, Monsanto and a few others) but not as a history of the evil of corporations. The title does touch on several aspects of how corporations came to be - including coverage of some of the key court cases - but it rushes through this part which really is key to understanding why these entities are such a thread to freedom. Instead, the film focuses on the misdeeds of a few often targeted mega corporations and proceeds to beat the dead horse of foreign labor and environmental concerns. While I expected this title to reference these companies and the deeds they have committed, but I did not expect said deeds to be the focus of this documentary, rather, I expected this documentary to be a documentary to explain some of the other anti-corporate documentaries (Frontline: Is Wal-Mart Good for America?, Who Killed the Electric Car?, Super Size Me, ad nauseum) by delving in depth into the history of the making of corporations, how they came to be and how they got to their present day status of being nearly exempt from regulation and taxation. Instead, this area was covered quickly, briefly and in a lackluster manner and the viewer was reminded of the same subject matter already covered (in more depth, I might add) in other films. In all, this film was a disappointment. It was billed as a history of corporations and how they came to be the way they are. As far as I am concerned, there is still much room in the marketplace for a well-done documentary on this subject, because The Corporation just doesn't fill the void.

The Corporation Available from Amazon Price: $24.99 Updated on 11-27-2008.

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