King Corn

Aaron Woolf’s documentary King Corn springs from an intriguing premise: Two friends with Iowa ancestries return to their great-grandfathers’ county to seed, grow and harvest 1 acre of corn. In the process, they illuminate the disturbing link between the intentional overproduction of genetically modified corn and the disintegration of the American family farm—not to mention a countrywide obesity epidemic fueled by the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and corn-fed beef. King Corn is informative, fairly snappy entertainment that sails along on the charmingly naive artificiality of the central concept. Unfortunately, the would-be corn farmers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis (who co-wrote and co-produced) are so unbelievably dull on camera that they come across as doltish.