Product Description: Analyzing footage from advertising, television news, and industrial films, this film explores the meteoric rise and nature of the most pervasive institution of our time. Genre: Documentary Rating: NR Release Date: 5-APR-2005 Media Type: DVD
Amazon.com: 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 persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.
The Corporation 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.
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. --Richard T. Jameson
Highly recommended! I've truly enjoyed watching The Corporation and have now viewed it 3 times, and over the past 2 days have also watched the extended interviews on the second disc. I particularly appreciated the views from Ray Anderson, Dr. Vandana Shiva and Ira Jackson. It was also interesting learning the views and perspectives of Marc Barry, Carlton Brown and others, despite their honesty leaving me disturbed. This important documentary couldn't have come a moment too soon. Very thought-provoking.
Rhe Corporation It is very good CD and with good and packing it safe. But your price is little it expensive.
Really disappointing I'm wondering if I saw the same documentary as these reviewers? We didn't make it past the first 15 minutes which was an amalgam of B-reel clips strung together to pictorial-ize a variety of audio clips of various persons using metaphors to describe corporate activities. It was simply a non-sensical introduction. We loved the book, and were really looking forward to seeing the documentary. Instead, the first fifteen minutes of garbage just turned us off. Seriously - I don't think I've written any negative reviews before, and I felt compelled this time to let others know that this may not be what they are expecting.
Sobering look at how big business & big government are . . . Sobering look at how big business & big government are NOT serving your best interests. Their goal is money to point of unbelievable greed,those in government have the goal of maintaining power and that is a bad combination.
Everyone should see this movie, and I mean everyone!
The Corporation Completely Controls If you enjoy documentaries, you will most likely enjoy this film. I watched a good portion of this film in late last fall. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to buy it. However, I just recently got around to viewing it. I don't know what took me so long because it was definitely worth the money and the two and a half hours of my time.
This film shows the far-reaching impact that the corporation has on the world. It gives a broad scope but yet zooms in to give detailed views of the different impacts that the corporation has (most of it bad). Michael Moore points to the fact that it's perfectly fine for corporations to do good, and they do, but the problem is that they care about the bottom line and everyone else bears the large cost in their pursuit of profit.
I can really get into films like this, and I found myself laughing out loud and engaged with this film and getting fired up, as two whistle blowers who worked for a large media corporation, refused to compromise their integrity at the cost of not reporting the truth about a very potentially harmful effect that a growth hormone used on dairy cows has on humans who drink their milk, not to mention the unnecessary pain and health complications it puts the cows through.
Yet tears put those flames out, as some parts made me angry, followed by sadness. One part of the film shows just how far corporations will go; by attempts of one corporation to privatize water (in I believe) a Latin American country. In wide protests, forces were called in to challenge the protesters, and a young man was shot and killed in the process.
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