Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are a pair of anticorporate pranksters. In the early Nineties, Andy was the video-game programmer who replaced top-heavy bimbos in a game he was working on with studs kissing each other. Mike was infamous for switching the voiceboxes in male and female dollies, causing raised eyebrows and nervous giggles on Christmas Day as Barbie belted out GI Joe's catchprase, "Vengeance is mine".
Together they are into identity theft. They set up a website (www.gatt.org) which spoofed the World Trade Organisation's site. Initially just a bit of fun.
But then visitors to the site started inviting them to events around the world. How could they refuse? This documentary follows them as, dressed in suits from charity shops, they deliver a series of lectures designed to amplify WTO ideas to the point where they become illegal, immoral or just plain absurd.
Their actions straddle the line of what you might expect at such events. Their proposal to privatise democracy and sell voting rights to the highest bidder, for example, is received with great interest.
Best of all is their unveiling of a new invention - an orange suit with a phallus-like attachment which inflates priapically to accommodate a video screen. This allows the busy manager to keep up to the minute, even while being a busy manager away from the office. The Yes Men are ingratiatingly likeable comedy terrorists with cheeky grins and infectious sniggers. But as they get more political, they slip out of their depth. This documentary has been sitting on the shelf for some time. It took Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me to get it released.
