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 tinseltown: the yes men
This week, fooling the fat cats. Remember the Barbie Liberation Army? They purchased talking Barbies and GI Joes, switched their voice chips so that metrosexual GI Joe declared his love of shopping and kinky Barbie talked about heavy artillery, then “shopgifted” the altered dolls back onto store shelves where they were sold to unsuspecting customers. Now ex-libber Mike Bonanno is back with a new politically targeted prank – impersonating the World Trade Organization. Bonanno and friend, Andy Bichlbaum (also a pro-prankster who snuck scenes of boy-on-boy action into the Sim City video game while employed as a programmer), made a website, www.gatt.org, that was meant to be a fairly obvious spoof of the WTO. Then people started asking them serious questions about trade, complimenting them on their insight and inviting them to serious conferences as WTO representatives. The resulting movie, The Yes Men, put together by the people behind 1999’s American Movie, follows Bonanno and Bichlbaum as they don suits and smart-guy glasses to push free market theories as far as they will go. From an economic conference in Finland to a nerve-wracking appearance on CNBC, their proclamations are so Swiftian that it’s hard to believe no one caught on. It’s a nice departure from the raft of heavy political documentaries that are taking up all the frothy summer movie spots at the box office. And, with an upcoming book, it’s just a matter of time before Bonanno and Bichlbaum join forces with Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace for some sort of ultimate get. The real victory now lies in pranking the pranksters: we could contact them through the gatt.org site pretending to represent a consortium of multinational corporations who have seen the evil of their ways and would like to formally petition the WTO to change its policies. All negotiations, of course, would only be done in the backseats of limos or over a few lines off a stripper’s breasts, because, hey, that’s how corporate fat cats roll. Do you think they’d realise?
Jade Chang
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related info
 useful linkswww.mgm.com/ua/yesmen www.americanmovie.com
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