It was definitely a day where people should have stayed indoors. It was raining, and windy, but I decided to go out anyway. When I returned home, my parents were stranded outside the house; I locked the storm door before I left not knowing they would return this early. I was supposed to pick them up from the airport later this evening.

My friend K., my sister and I went to the Princess II theatre in Old Strathcona to see a matinée movie, after a quick browse through Greenwoods and HUB Cigar & Newstand. The Corporation is a 145-minute documentary on multi-national corporations that exist for one motive only, and that is money. According to the movie, a corporation shows all of the symptoms of a psychopath, as diagnosed using the DSM-IV manual. These include things such as inability to form long-term relationships (when cheap labour gets too expensive, they look to other desperate countries whose only asset is manual labour) and do not accept responsibility for anything (ecological disasters, the general welfare of its workers, etc.) It even showed how IBM was related to the holocaust (victims' information was stored on punch cards, and the machines to read these were programmed by IBM, even at Dachau, the concentration camp). Kathie Lee Gifford, who didn't know that children making handbags with her brand name on it earned virtually nothing, brought media attention to the sweatshop issue, but today, Wal-Mart is still paying them about 3 cents per hour. Other topics include biotechnology and patenting genes, the privatization of water, and overzealous media giants.

The best part was Michael Moore talking about how he is able to talk about greedy corporations publicly in a movie, but the film company will still distribute it because they know that people will pay to watch this documentary, and that will translate into profit for the company. He also says the company also knows that people won't do a thing to change anything either, so the negative publicity probably wouldn't do any harm to their business.

So get up and do something. Stand up to these conglomerates who will leave the Earth in a mess. Is this what you want for your children and grand-children?

Overall, it's a great movie. I highly recommend it, especially if you are into sociological issues (like I am). Oh yeah, did you know that AOL Time Warner owns the rights to the "Happy Birthday" song, and you would have to pay a royalty in the tens of thousands of dollars if you include it in your movie?