King Corn

I've been meaning to watch this for a while now ever since I saw the trailer...3 years ago.

This was a long piece highlighting the prevalence of corn in our diets. From the corn fed to the cattle, to the corn used in sweeteners, to the corn you drink. It's pretty hard to avoid the dangerous and unhealthy kind of corn from day to day. Two guys movie to Iowa and decide to plant an acre of corn to see how it really is, up close.

This is the kind of doc that opens with an introduction of two people, when you know they're not the focus of the whole thing, so that was kind of weird. The focus is really on corn and the corn industry as a whole. I think it was a very strange opening to the doc, music wise, editing wise, the low camera angle the took when they were late for their meeting. It was a strange set up to get into the action and the point of the film. I feel like we came in the middle of the action. They had an idea and then dropped us in the middle of it without much setup.

I feel like the relying on voice over is so easy. Like you can not worry about having to ask all the right questions while you're there. You can follow up later and plug in the statistics and facts to fill everyone in. I don't know why it draws my attention. It's a completely valid way to make a documentary and it's done quite a lot. It just seems to break the action up sometimes. Like maybe it could be show don't tell. The whole time, I found myself trying to figure out how they could have done particular things on camera instead of in voice over. I guess I came from the features school of thought where a voice over means lazy. Bt even that's not always true when it's stylistic. Heathers has a voice over. Kiss Kiss Bag Bang has voice over. Both awesome movies.

Sad to learn that corn is fed to cattle and it slowly kills them. It's cheaper because farms grow so much of it but, unlike grass, which they used to eat, corn makes them heavier/fatter but kills them. Confine them, don't let them move, and feed them corn. Yikes. And this corn make sthe cow more fatty, which makes the beef more fatty. Which meakes you ingest more fat.

I found it surprising that the guys continued to eat MCDonalds and other junk, corn-fed, terrible for you, high fructose containing, crap food. You'd think they'd at least make an attempt to cut that out of their diets a bit. Especially since they talked to Fray the cabbie and learned about his family that's been affected so heavily by diabetes. Made me feel better about the fact that I stopped drinking pop in high school.