False hope

I liked the first Yes Men film, but thought that it lacked some unidentifiable unifying principle.  The Yes Men Fix the World remedies the uneven episodic nature of that first film by zeroing in on a theme: false hope vs. enacted anticipation of imagined realities.  This theme ties Fix the World's episodes together and paves the way to one of the finest endings I've seen all year.

The Yes Men effectively actualize the change they wish to see happen.  Only for a moment.  But really for a moment.  

As harbingers of the change that must occur if we do not first destroy ourselves, the Yes Men defy the present world order to the shame of us all, to the extent that we rationalize our own particpation in its evils.

Back to the ending.  It reminded me of nothing more than the grand finale of that very special film, The Muppet Movie.  All possibilites, however remote, spread open before us and all of the artifice involved in the making of the movie is washed away in a wave of audacious joy.  I don't remember ever crying at the end of The Muppet Movie.  I was sniffling back tears at the end of Fix the World.

Speaking of false hope, the Cornell student films were largely a disappointment.  To be fair, these were the Intro class films.  Next week are a few Intermediate films and some animation.

I won't go over them all since there's little chance that anyone else will ever see them.

The two best films were The Elephant in the Room, a humorous "coming out" tale, and Reel Culture, a documentary about Cornell Cinema.  Love at First Site showed promise and Young Blood was too cool for its own good.  Both were about fleeting relationships.  The rest were mostly disposable, though none were entirely bad.  I'll save the program and check IMDB in ten years for the names of all involved.