BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

You simply cannot comprehend modern society unless you understand the history, growth, and pervasiveness of corporate power.

That’s why BuzzFlash is offering a new spellbinding and engrossing documentary, The Corporation, that charts the birth of corporations and how they evolved from being short-term community based institutions that would dissolve after time to later being defined as "persons" granted with rights and liberties by American courts. Slick lawyers and industrial robber barons turned post-Civil War due process laws -- meant to give African-Americans civil rights -- on their heads and carved out a roadmap for corporations to consume resources, capital, and labor ad infinitum.

Greed, political corruption, unchecked power, mass consumption, and environmental destruction are the results of the ascension of corporations that now dominate our democratic processes, the media, the quality of life, and indeed our reality.

The Corporation remarkably tells this untold story with humor, balance, and stunning visual imagery that marks it as one of the best documentaries of last year, and one of the best treatises of corporate power.

The film’s strength is that it is a truly enlightening and engaging look at a complex issue, and not a leftist diatribe. The film highlights interviews from the full political spectrum including Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein (Author of No Logo), Nobel Prize-winning economist and staunch conservative Milton Friedman, as well as CEO’s and executives of major corporations. As an example, the film juxtaposes segments of environmental destruction with interviews with corporate executives from the oil industry who claim they became executives to help the environment. The film delves into the divide between personal responsibility and well-intentioned individuals that run corporations versus the intrinsic behavior and evils of the corporate system.

Filmmakers Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan put corporations through a running psychoanalysis to ask what kind of a person – since that’s what a corporation apparently is – would inflict so much pain and misery on others in the pursuit of profit and power. The result is an in-depth, humorous, and shocking documentary that leaves you breathless, but definitely not hopeless.

From child labor and sweatshops, to the company that once produced Agent Orange that now adds hormones to your milk, to the explanation of how IBM helped the Nazi’s streamline the Holocaust, The Corporation will change the way you see globalization and big business. By the end of the film, witness how people are addressing and fighting back the power of corporations from movements in South America to stop the privatization of drinking water – yes, drinking water -- by large conglomerates to small towns in America standing up to corporate giants.

This is a film you simply must see for yourself. It is equally an intellectual feast and a visceral story that will depress you, shock you, and inspire you and will no doubt keep your mind buzzing for days as you urge your friends and family to see it for themselves. BuzzFlash gives The Corporation our highest endorsement and gets our “must see” film recommendation.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS