Last night I attended two movies at Film Streams, the first by my lonesome and the second with the DH and ML.
The first film was Ang Lee’s “Lust/Caution”, a spy thriller set in Japanese-occupied China during WWII. It was an excellent movie, full of suspense, drama, good sex schemes and plenty of violence. The only downside was that it only screened at 4 p.m., so no one else was able to go with me…
The second film was “King Corn”, a documentary about…well, corn. Two guys, Ian and Curt, decided to move from Boston to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and follow its fate. They learn all about live in the Corn Belt – farm folks, Iowa winters, government subsidies, and the horrifying fact that thousands of acres of corn are grown in this country that are inedible to humans. This corn cannot be eaten in its natural form, and must be processed into high-fructose corn syrup and other various forms that look nothing like corn and have basically no redeeming nutritional value. I thought this was an incredibly informative and educational film – these guys really did their research – as well as being highly entertaining. I was really happy that the DH went with me – he seemed to enjoy the movie and learn a lot. I have already done quite a bit of reading on the subject (even getting a little bit giddy when they interviewed Michael Pollen – I know, I’m a dork), and it was really cool to watch the movie with him and be able to converse with him about it later, rather than describing the movie to him and knowing he wouldn’t really care ‘cause he wouldn’t be familiar with the subject matter.
