King Corn

This documentary does a fairly entertaining job of presenting the ideas of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) in a digestible format. Director Aaron Woolf follows two best friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, after their graduation from Yale, as they pack into a pickup and head for the Iowa town where by chance the great-grandfathers of both came from. They intend to grow one acre of corn and follow it from field to market, to explain how our bodies got to be so full of the stuff. They trace the development back to Nixon’s infamous secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, who changed farm policy from subsidizing non-production to encouraging all-out production. The incentive became to grow as much as possible, with all the profit in the process coming from the federal subsidy. As industrialization increased yield, the product had to have a place to go and it went largely to bulking up cattle, even though they are meant to eat grass and the corn would kill them if they weren’t slaughtered first. Then that excess corn was processed into the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which has destroyed the American diet over the past few decades and yielded an epidemic of obesity. And now of course, we are subsidizing the inefficient production of ethanol from corn. A disastrous policy all round. The two guys are not characterized sufficiently to make for an involving documentary drama (or comedy in the vein of Super Size Me), but in trying not to be dull they pull out all stops, from timelapse photography of the growing cornfield to animation involving a plastic toy farm picked up at a real farm’s foreclosure auction. The antics can be a little scattershot, but the message gets across. If you’ve read Pollan, it’s a lot of fooling around to make a familiar point, but if not, it’s important information in a palatable format. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-70.)

Much in the same vein, Everything’s Cool, a 2007 documentary by Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand, leavens its warnings about global warming with humor and a variety of filmic techniques, from interviews with the likes of Bill McKibben to animation by Emily Hubley, but in sum the effect is less eclectic that merely miscellaneous. The most illuminating part offers clips of oil-financed “scientists” sowing doubts about the facts of the case, and trying to reduce global warming to one “theory” in a “debate.” This muddying of the waters, of course, has been the Bushies’ main strategy on various issues, from evolution to education, from preemptive war to torture and other human rights violations. But it is still not true that if you say something false often enough with a straight face -- aside from the contemptuous sneer -- that the facts become debatable. Eventually reality will bite you back.

I’m not sure why I’ve been sucked in like never before, but the Beijing Olympics are definitely eating into the my film viewing these days. Perhaps it’s the same with you. Nonetheless I will soon resume the pace of my reviewing.