What You Missed in the Nader Q&A Written By: Michelle Haimoff 2007-02-15 14:30:55 Following are some snippets from the Q&A after the 9:55pm screening of An Unreasonable Man on January 31st, 2007. The Nader camp consisted of Jason Kafoury, Henriette Mantel, Theresa Amato, Jim Musselman and Steve Skrovan.
Who Killed the Electric Car? Written By: Michelle Haimoff 2006-12-11 15:36:20 Who Killed the Electric Car? is pretty much what you’d expect – a 90-minute infomercial about the electric vehicle crossed with a scathing expose of the evil oil and automotive industries.
The protagonist of the film is a bright-eyed redhead named Chelsea Sexton, who joined the marketing team for GM’s prototype electric car, EV1, fresh out of college. Other good guys include scruffy-faced celebrities like Peter Horton and Ed Begley, Jr., who you may recall from the Simpsons episode where he drives a go-cart powered by his own sense of self-satisfaction. In this cameo, he eulogizes the EV1 at a staged funeral for the car in 2003, where activists dressed in black placed flowers on the hood.
The film traces the history of the electric car, from its inception at the turn of the 20th century to its demise at the turn of the 21st. The main focus is the cars’ surge in popularity in recent years with the 1990 Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, and its abrupt disappearance when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) modified the mandate, prompting car companies to recall and destroy all existing electric vehicles. Although there were waitlists for EV1s at the time of the recall, GM claimed that there was little demand, and EV1 drivers were prohibited from purchasing the vehicles, despite their best efforts.
The movie is hilarious. The unscripted moments where Americans say the darndest things, the bungled broken English phrases that beg to be quoted, the physical comedy that continues until the theater is hysterical, then uproarious. The San Francisco Chronicle perhaps describes it best as "screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny."
