The Great world of Documentary film-making

Documentaries are my favourite film category, in general. Documentary films can be very potent tools to effect social change. But just like unions, and environmental groups, and the tea party, the methods used by sincere activists for the good of "all" against profit for "the few", get copy-catted by the powerful in order to dupe those without power. Counter-revolutionary information meant to disinform, in the guise of ground level people.

But as a film watcher and not a film maker, it's come to my attention that more and more documentaries are being made (thanks to cheaper digital technology) and pretty much anyone can call themselves a documentarist, many with very low production values. Crappy documentaries hurt the realm of documentary film making in two ways:
1-they're just plain too boring to watch and provide no knowledge
2-by lowering the quality bar they make it easy for corporate agendas to duplicate the documentary style in order to get their own corporate message across.

Watching this was extremely disappointing to me. I learned nothing from this film, the production values were ridiculously low, editing, camerawork, direction, all were poor. In this film I sensed I was the one they were trying to dupe, because none of these two clowns' behaviour was believable in the first place. A potentially better approach would have been to tell a YES MEN story from a a third party vantage point, and include more media coverage, which would seek to demonstrate that their actions are having any real consequence (there were only a couple of media takes in the entire film). As it stands, the movie is less about their actions and politics, then it is about them, they just look and behave like clowns, which is not a quality. The guy has no public speaking talent and was not properly prepared for the actions we saw presented.

When I watch a film such as this, I almost get the impression that these guys are actually paid by the corporate world in order to ridicule activism itself. Their activism is so ineffectual that I was laughing at them instead of with them at the WTO.

***So I've seen 4 movies/wk in theatre for a 1/4 century, call me crazy?**