The Yes Men

I love this movie! I had already seen it, but it was interesting to see it with the idea of recycling/reusing/reworking footage in mind for our last project. The Yes Men seems to use that idea in a very creative and innovative manner. Instead of taking video clips from various sources to create a found footage product, they took the idea into a website template. They took an image, a format, an idea, and put it into another context. As in many found footage videos, the new website was a critique of the owner or subject of the old website. Just as in found footage films of various news footage or clips of a single person, it is easy to change or complete remove the context and turn it into something else. The Yes Men created that idea by taking the context of another organization's website, duplicating it, and then critiquing it with in the template of the old site.

I found it very interesting to see how many people don't actually read the WTO's website. It is amazing with all of the information on the internet and the well known fact that scam sites are easy to create and catch people with, that a person wouldn't be more careful about their research. It seems that people think the internet is the answer to everything, and that it is just as reliable as a library book, which is obviously not the case. I can't believe that if a group was going to invite an important speaker from the WTO, they wouldn't read the website at the very least to gather information to ask him about, or in this case to make sure that the site is authentic.

As far as the movie goes, I'm obviously glad that they could pull it off, because it made for a great movie, and I thought their way of fighting for a cause was really interesting and down right hilarious. It was a really cool way of taking material, adjusting the context, and adding a statement or cause to it.