:
Robert Greenwald,
Robert Greenwald
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: Not Rated
: Disinformation
: Documentary, Political & Social Issues
: 162 min.
: English
: Spanish, French
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Wal-Mart has become one of America's most successful retail chains by offering everyday goods at low prices for working families. But just how is Wal-Mart able to charge less than many of their rivals, and what has their success done for their employees? Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald takes a look inside the discount retailer's empire in Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and discovers a company short on scruples and long on shabby treatment of the people who work for them. Through interviews with labor experts and former Wal-Mart employees, Greenwald documents the firm's anti-union tactics, their history of paying wages often below the poverty line, the high price they charge for health benefits (employees are often encouraged to apply for government subsidized health care programs instead), their methods for driving away locally owned businesses, their practice of hiring illegal aliens for cleanup crews at a fraction of minimum wage, the abysmal working conditions and pay in the Third World plants where much of Wal-Mart's goods are manufactured, and more. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price was one in a series of activist documentaries from director Greenwald which includes the films Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Uncovered: The War in Iraq, and Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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| Cheap and crappy (like a WalMart product)
by spegg
December 20, 2005 - 3:40 PM PST
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2 out of 7 members found this review helpful
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This documentary was a complete disappointment. While it has the raw footage needed to make its point (which is clear from just the cover image), it lacks any sort of cohesive narrative. The production values are low and the message this film tries to deliver is poorly represented by something so obviously slapped together by the "C" student in film school. At the end of this film I wanted to go shop at Wal-Mart just to piss off the film's producers.
The effect of Wal-Mart on America and the world is a wider subject than any one film is going to be able to describe. A good start would be the Frontline episode entitled "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?". It's available for free online. |
| The "Mart" of Our Dreams?
by talltale
December 7, 2005 - 9:25 PM PST
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4 out of 7 members found this review helpful
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A big step up from his earlier "Outfoxed" doc about the Murdoch News channel, Robert Greenwald's WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE will set you to thinking and perhaps pondering the rather immense gap between the incomes of the family that owns this chain and its just-above-poverty-level employees. As much as I thought I knew about Walmart policies, I still learned more here, as I suspect you will, too. Yes, this is agitprop, and there is another side to be heard. But if what that side says comes close to the lies that have already been told by this behemoth of cheap, what's the point?
With the Bush administration's constant promotion of charity, rather than government, as the thing that must take responsibility for the poor, how does it explain this company's refusal to give to charity, along with it's pushing its employees to sign up for welfare? This is only one of the many ironic juxtapositions that will someday come back to haunt the horrors who currently govern us--and the sleaze-bags who contribute to their political campaigns--once America has come to its senses and kicked the crumb-bums out. If any of those senses remain, of course. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 6.74)
57 Votes
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