Corn, even if displayed in an artful shot, is still corn.

I enjoy a freaky documentary as much as the next guy, so when I saw that Hybrid was about corn, the midwest, and a man who spent his life loving corn, I was excited. Usually, any topic can make good fodder for a documentary, provided it's presented in an interesting fashion. Wow, a good documentary can make me think, I didn't know anything about Tammy Faye/ gerbil trainers/ tibetan chanting. And: I didn't even know how much there was to know about topiary gardeners/ quilting/ Levittown, Long Island.

Unfortunetly, Hybrid didn't click for me at all. Since corn doesn't do much but just stand there and grow, there's a visual problem -- what do you show? The result are 90 minutes of artsy black-and-white shots of corn, farmhouses on the plains, tires dangling from trees, and the like. Narration comes in form of sound bytes that are either old or purposefully edited to sound as if they came from a muddy WWII receiver.

Some of the stories about the Milford Beeghly, man who pioneered hybrid corn, are fascinating enough, but the strain of listening to them and the deliberatly slow pace of the movie killed most of my interest. For comic relief, there are some bizarre animations of humping corn that look a bit like Tetsuo the Iron Man if you replaced the scrap metal with corn on the cob. Unfortunately, those glimpses of joy are immediately smothered with a picturesque cropduster flight over fields of corn while violins mourn on the soundtrack.

There's an interesting documentary hidden somewhere in there, but the style works consistently against the content, leaving the distinct impression that if director Moneith McCollum hadn't tried so damn hard, Hybrid could have been hilarious and fascinating. As it is, I side with Milford Beeghly's daugher, who is heard saying: "I don't think about it. Corn is corn."

USA, 2000. 92 min.