This evening, Ross and I went to the wonderful Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, where we saw a film that is at once hilarious, physically nauseating, sobering, and quite incredible. It’s called The Yes Men, and if you notice it playing at an independent theatre near you, I highly encourage you to go see it (if only for the sublimely ridiculous sounding French pop songs that are on the soundtrack). You may have heard of The Yes Men, or their hijinks. They are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, two prankster-activists who, among other things in their career of what they call “Identity Correction,”* have pretended to be officials from the World Trade Organization with names like “Granwyth Hulatberi” and “Hank Hardy Unruh,” making appearances at international conferences and on news programs while spouting ludicrous statements which are, if not strictly true, at least ones that they believe to be in the spirit of the WTO’s actions.

Like “Let’s recycle shit, so that we can make it into McDonalds hamburgers to feed to the starving in third world countries.” And “Slavery was bad, yeah. But if the North had just left the South alone, it’d all have worked itself out in the end, because slaveowners would have figured out that it’s much more profitable and less risky to employ people at insultingly low wages in their own countries.” (Andy’s earnest, detached delivery, slight frown, serious looking spectacles, and academic “ums” and “ahs” are perfect.) The scary part is that apart from one audience of college kids in Pennsylvania, most of their presentations meet with little more than polite applause and smiling nods (hence their name). One of their biggest gags involved Andy unveiling a skintight gold leisure suit with a big inflatable phallus at a conference in Finland, for reasons I will not reveal.

Go see the movie. Try to get it to play at your school. It’s not the greatest documentary ever made — it’s hard to follow at times, and I was left with a lot of questions — but it’s pretty smart, eye-opening, and you get to see a guy wearing a gold suit with a giant phallus attached to it. You can’t ask for much more than that. Visit The Yes Men’s website to read more. And if you live in Cambridge or Boston, dude. Why not become a member of the Brattle? 12 free tickets to great films (tickets which are ordinarily 9 bucks) for a $75 membership fee? As James Earl Jones says, “It’s kind of a no-brainer.”

* Wherein “honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.”

Oh, P.S:

:)