King Corn (2006, USA)

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma a few weeks ago, so the bulk of the information presented in King Corn felt like a review. The documentary follows two college friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, as they grow an acre of corn in Iowa and try to determine how so much of it ends up in American bodies. It's an entertaining, fairly light treatment of the bizarre and often frightening ways in which corn impacts our lives, spurred on by the fact that Cheney and Ellis are genial, interested protagonists - there isn't the grandstanding you get in a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock documentary, though their works are surely as much an inspiration to the filmmakers as Pollan's is (Pollan himself appears in the film, and his work is acknowledged in the credits as a primary source). In addition to the affability of the filmmakers, a few other things make the treatment of the material stand out - the lo-fi aesthetic is charming rather than cloying, and there are several inspired bits, as when Cheney and Ellis try to make high fructose corn sweetner on the stovetop (they're denied any opportunities to film in an actual factory), or when they visit former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, the man largely credited for the current state of farm subsidies, in his retirement home, to ask him what he thinks of today's corporate culture of corn farming. Not everyone is going to read Pollan or Eric Schlosser, and King Corn provides an excellent, entertaining overview of one very important part of the current climate of American food culture.