Al Gore (and friends) accepted the Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," which waltzed into the winner's circle as a box office phenomenon and obvious shoo-in, even though it wasn't much more than a riveting PowerPoint presentation with good lighting. Recently, there have been rumblings from the scientific community about Gore's grasp of the details. Few doubt his premise, yet scientists (on both sides of the debate) have suggested that some of his arguments — such as suggesting a direct cause-effect between global warming and hurricanes — were exaggerated for the purposes of getting people's attention.

From the loins of Moore sprang Morgan Spurlock, of the Oscar-nominated "Super Size Me," who decided the best way to expose the malfeasance of the fast-food industry was to eat nowhere but at McDonald's for 30 days and monitor his health deterioration. While we didn't learn much from that movie that serious journalists hadn't objectively reported in far greater detail, it proved to be good for Spurlock. He got his own documentary television show on the FX channel, "30 Days," wherein he (or occasionally someone else) got immersed in an alien culture and lived to tell the tale: surviving on minimum wage, serving time. You get the picture.

Actually, we don't get the picture. In Spurlock's work, and in the work of many contemporary documentarians, we get a picture of the filmmaker's p.o.v. and not much else. That's because this crop of documentarians doesn't seem to believe that shooting real life — what happens without their interference — is sufficiently interesting.

Along the way, a strange thing happens. The filmmakers' hipper-than-thou preachiness (or, in Gore's case, unhipper-than-thou earnestness) makes us inclined to pick fights with them. Before too long we find ourselves arguing against dire predictions about global warming and eating Big Macs while we're doing it. Why? Because even though these movies are labeled "provocative," there used to be another word for this style of film. It also starts with the letter P.

That's not to say that the true-believer "embellishments" in "An Inconvenient Truth" deeply discredit the movie. But if Gore gets his own show on FX, I may start cutting down trees. On the other hand, he could team up with Spurlock and spend 30 days in the White House. From there, he could propagandize with impunity.