King Corn (Green Packaging)
by Aaron Woolf
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DVD details
Actor: Chuck Pyatt, Curt Ellis, Ian Cheney, Michael Pollan, Stephen MackoDirector: Aaron Woolf
Brand: NEW VIDEO GROUP INC
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-04-29
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: DOCURAMA
DVD Reviews of King Corn (Green Packaging)
DVD Review: It takes too long to get to the point
Summary: 3 Stars
It's okay. Lots of fillers about their down time should have been edited out. I struggled to watch the whole thing. Their idea and research was interesting.DVD Review: Think BEYOND Supersize Me!!
Summary: 5 Stars
King Corn really isn't fairly categorized as a little brother of Supersize Me. It is an entertaining though disturbing documentary that is more accurately categorized with other food INDUSTRY documentaries, such as Food, Inc. or The World According to Monsanto (both alarming and eye-opening as well).
Supersize Me is wonderful for following, in one man, the appalling health deterioration born of eating only corn (okay, of eating only McDonald's, but watch King Corn, and you'll see the direct parallel), but Supersize Me doesn't cover how the US government indirectly yet absolutely funds the fast food industry and almost every packaged, processed, unhealthy food on the market by subsidizing the commodity crops that are those foods' core ingredients.
Watch King Corn. Then watch Supersize Me again (or for the first time--it's REALLY entertaining). And this time you'll understand WHY it costs McDonald's only five cents for every twenty five cent Supersize they're able to sell. It's because corn is subsidized; it's cheap. And corn is in EVERYTHING they serve.
And by the way, the irony of this in the midst of our current healthcare battle is tremendous. Government pays for the creation of cheap, abundant, crappy food that makes our bodies obese, diabetic, and sick, then Congress fights about how to fund the ever-growing healthcare burden of obese, diabetic, sick patients. Regardless of HOW we fund it, we're fighting about the pound of cure. I don't argue that government should strip farm subsidies. But if we're really going to argue about the cost of healthcare, we should be fighting about how to better use farm subsidy funds to grow healthy food. We should be fighting about ounce of prevention.
DVD Review: important information
Summary: 5 Stars
King Corn is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. It is presented in an interesting way and is about a very important subject. I have shown it to all my family already and recommend everyone see it. The power of the people who are working together to subsidize corn growing to the detriment of other programs and our health is amazing. Really eye opening documentary. DVD Review: Great documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
This film had a very independent feel to it, making it seem more credible and less like propaganda than big-budget films from either side of the spectrum. The two friends who made it are great at illustrating their ideas in an entertaining way and making the film both fun to watch and full of good information.
Note: It says Michael Pollan on the byline, but I think he simply made a brief appearance if any in the film. The movie was made by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis.
DVD Review: Relevant, timely, engaging, and informative
Summary: 4 Stars
For those who were shocked and amazed by the workings of the food industry in the documentary Food, Inc. There is another little known film that came out in 2006 that serves as a sort of compendium project. King Corn documents a year in the life of two Bostonians who lease an acre of land in Iowa to grow a crop of corn.
Ironically, the college chums, a couple of likeable fellows with an affinity for whiffle-ball and fast food, both had a great grandfather from the same county in Iowa. So once the two find a landowner to lease them the property and a farmer to help them plant their crop, they start to explore not only their familial roots, but the roots of the corn industry. As the corn grows, so does their search, bringing them to some truly eye-opening realizations about the US food industry.
Though a lot of the information has been touched on in films like Food, Inc. and Super Size Me as well as books like Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, King Corn delivers it from a different perspective. By telling the story from a would-be farmer's perspective, the filmmakers are just as amazed as we are when they learn firsthand some of the inner workings of the agricultural industry. From the realization that US farmers are paid primarily through government subsidies since they often actually lose money on their crops to the fact that the majority of corn grown in Iowa is so genetically altered that it is not suitable to be eaten, even for those who have heard this information before, the film delivers it in such a compelling way that it seems fresh and consistently alarming.
The filmmakers deliver an evenhanded expose of the corn industry that doesn't seem as scathing as so many documentaries of late have. Nevertheless, by the end, when they actually have to take their harvest to market, you can really feel their heartbreak as they sell their prize crop with no idea where it will be going or what it will be used for. Will it be one of the 20,000 acres of corn it takes just to sweeten the sodas consumed in Brooklyn, NY in one year? Will it be used to quickly fatten up cattle? Or will it be used in one of the thousands of other food products made primarily of corn?
The film points out that we now spend less of our income on food than any generation in history, and fewer of us are needed to produce that food. However, considering that we are sacrificing so much of the nutritional value to keep costs down in a society with an explosion of problems like obesity and obesity, we have to wonder if we shouldn't reconsider our food budget. As one interviewee says of the government agricultural subsidies, "We subsidize the Happy Meals, but we don't subsidize the healthy ones." And yet so many of the farmers in the film insisted that if the American people demanded healthy food, they would be glad to grow it, but the current schism of quickly grown, high yield, low nutrition agriculture is going to be hard to break from. Nevertheless, considering that the impetus for the film was the realization that for the first time in history, this generation's life expectancy is lower than the generation before, our diets need to become a higher priority.
Description of King Corn (Green Packaging)
KING CORN is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naivete, college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America.With the help of some real farmers, oodles of fertilizer and government aide, and some genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way, they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America s modern food system in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary.
A graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors (Salon), KING CORN shows how and why whenever you eat a hamburger or drink a soda, you re really consuming ... corn.
Picking up where Super Size Me left off, King Corn examines America's health woes through the multifaceted lens of one humble grain. Director Aaron Woolf and co-writers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis offer irrefutable proof that the US is virtually drowning in the stuff. Corn meal, corn starch, hydrologized corn protein, and high fructose corn syrup fuel a multitude of products, from soft drinks to hamburgers. The starchy vegetable grows with ease and government subsidies insure over-abundant production. Woolf documents the 11-month effort of college friends Cheney and Ellis, who trace their ancestry to the same small Iowa town, to raise their own crop. After finding a farmer willing to lend them an acre, they meet with agronomists, historians, and other experts before plowing, seeding, and spraying. Prior to harvesting, the easygoing Yale grads travel to Colorado to compare the grass-fed cattle of yore with today's corn-fed counterparts; then to New York to explore the links between corn syrup, obesity, and diabetes. With assistance from author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), a whimsical score, and stop-motion animation--farm toys and corn kernels--Woolf and associates bring biochemistry to vivid life. On a micro level, this genial eye-opener celebrates friends and farmers; on a macro level, King Corn bemoans the subsidies and genetic modifications that have turned a formerly protein-filled product into the fatty "yellow dent no. 2." Bonus features include a music video, photo gallery, and "The Lost Basement Lectures," an amusingly fake instructional movie about the aims of agriculture. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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