A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IF YOU'RE GOING TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE INTO A CAR, WHY NOT DO IT IN SOME STYLE? Something spurred by seeing the trailer for Monster House for the umpteenth time last night. Is there another filmmaker currently working who's been more of a disappointment in recent years than Robert Zemeckis? The 1984-1997 filmography is pretty darn excellent (Romancing The Stone, three Back To The Future movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump (which can certainly be criticized, but could have, in lesser hands, been completely intolerable--cf. I Am Sam), and Contact), with only one big miss (Death Becomes Her). Since then, we've had "give me an Oscar again!" (Cast Away), an incomprehensible ghost story (What Lies Beneath), and pretty without plot (The Polar Express). So, what went wrong and can Zemeckis fix it with his upcoming credits (a "performance capture" version of Beowulf and a film version of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections)?