Who Killed the Electric Car? (Chris Paine, 2006). Another example of bitter editorializing barely disguised as documentary filmmaking. Paine relays the truncated history of the General Motors EV1 and other competing efforts to create a viable electric car in the mid-1990's, largely in response to emissions regulations in the state of California. It's easy to get stirred up by the corporate indifference to innovation that the film depicts (especially when the other denizen of the screening room is a former big-three-automaker engineer who has her own tales from the front) and Paine is clearly content to just keep pushing those hot buttons, indicting every major component of the power structure including oil companies and the government. His assessment may very well be correct but the presentation is so one-sided that the film quickly becomes tiresome. Martin Sheen's overcooked narration doesn't help. He presents even the most mundane facts with an off-putting tone of outraged bafflement.

Blades of Glory (Josh Gordon and Will Speck, 2007). Or Will Ferrell In His Underpants IV: Ice Skating. Writing down that Chazz Michael Michaels favored Mane 'n Tail as a personal grooming product earned earned my Trivia team a meager ten points, making me wonder why I bothered with this 93 minutes of misery. I laughed exactly once at this film. It was a throwaway line delivered by Will Arnett. If I weren't well-versed on the U.S. version of The Office, Jenna Fischer's performance in this movie would convince me that she can't act at all.

The Hoax (Lasse Hallstrom, 2007). A few years ago, we procured several bound collections of old newsmagazines from the Orlando library, undoubtedly being discarded in favor of microfiche arrays that utilized less precious shelf space. While paging through some of the Newsweeks from the early 1970's, I stumbled across the story of Clifford Irving and his falsified autobiography of the reclusive Howard Hughes, fascinated by the major play the story got in those pages. Hallstrom's dramatizes Irving's ruse, almost succeeding by the sheer audaciousness of real events. When it focuses of the mechanics of the hoax and the delighted mischief of the co-conspirators, it achieves a nice energy. Then the backstories and psychological complications and messy romantic entanglements begin to swamp the film. Irving is played by Richard Gere, an actor who has limited range but delivers typically nice work as a charming huckster (the other part of Gere's range is "entitled dick"). Hallstrom, on the other hand, has now completely devolved from the elegant simplicity of films like Once Around and What's Eating Gilbert Grape to a style that is purely pedestrian.

For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, 2006). I watched this primarily for Trivia purposes, too, but finding the film lackluster was very sad. Guest's splendid streak of semi-improvised wonders that began with Waiting for Guffman yields a complete clunker with this plodding send-up of the Hollywood awards season. Guest never nails the tone this time out as the broad jokes about addled publicists and pastrami-munching directors float in disharmony with the pathos of struggling actors who watch their fleeting shot at respectability fade to black. For the first time, Guest's troupe strains instead of soars.

Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007). It was hard work to see this one in its original release format. After circumstances conspired to keep us away from the three-hour-plus version last spring, the film tanked at the box office. After that, Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof were available separately on DVD and on cable, but the "double feature" version remained locked in the Weinstein warehouse, right around the same spot where that crated-up recovered ark resides, no doubt. Then Starz broke the embargo. I'm especially grateful because I'm quite certain I don't want to sit through Tarantino's film with an extra twenty-five minutes. It felt overlong at 90 minutes. The concept of recreating a trashy, old-school night at the movies with gore and sex and vengeance and cool, fast cars is entertaining enough, but the joke wears off before the huge number of reels have fully unspooled. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is the more successful of the pair, primarily because he has fully bought into the conceit and constructed a film that revels in the raw excesses of genre exploitation. The plot feels right, involving mutated, zombie-like creatures endless encroaching on a ragtag band of survivors holing up in a series of dives. Rodriguez further obliges with a raw, visceral approach to the visuals and an appropriately battered look to film stock. Like a lot of films of this ilk, it loses its appeal when it tries to offer an explanation for all the mayhem (and the mayhem starts to get too cartoonish). Tarantino, on the other hand, has simply made a Quentin Tarantino movie that borrows a standard road revenge plot. His character chatter on with stylized, hyper-verbose dialogue until he reaches his high-speed highway set pieces. Rodriguez used the grindhouse prompt as an inspiration. Tarantino used it as an excuse.