So as I blogged last month, I’ve seen the Control Room. I’ve seen The Fog of War. I own the DVDs of OutFoxed and Uncovered. I missed The Hunting of the President, but I read the book. This is clearly the summer of the political documentary.
So yesterday we were planning to go to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (which we still haven’t seen – are we the only ones?) But on Saturday we talked to my son Chris, and he urged us to go to see The Corporation first, so we did. It’s a study of the rise of the modern corporation over the last 150 years, from groups that were specifically chartered for limited purposes through the emergence of the corporation as a legal “person”, to today’s supranational entities.
It’s a very good documentary – it’s 145 minutes long, and the time flies by. It’s not a great documentary, in part because the film-makers tried to cram too much in, and lost focus. But on the other hand if you’re only ever going to watch one documentary on the subject, it’s probably a good tactic to cover as many bases as possible, to plant as many seeds for future reading, research, and – just maybe – action as they could.
My (un)favourite person: the woman psychologist who works on ways to make advertising targeted at pre-school children more “effective”: specifically, by making the children more productive naggers of their parents. She managed to keep her composure when asked whether she regarded what she did as “ethical”, but as she replied that she “didn’t know about ethics” her eyes told a different story.