TV Review: At the Death House Door - IFC's Gripping Documentary Tackles the Death Penalty

by Tony Dayoub

At the Death House Door is a solemn inquiry into the execution of Carlos De Luna, seen through the eyes of Pastor Carroll Pickett. De Luna was a Mexican American convicted of murdering gas station attendant Wanda Lopez in 1983 in Corpus Christi, Texas. As has been happening lately in many capital punishment cases, doubt has been cast over whether De Luna was actually guilty of the murder.

Pastor Carroll Pickett counseled the inmates of the "Walls" prison unit in Huntsville, overseeing nearly 100 executions, including the world's first lethal injection. Having lost two upstanding members of his congregation, during a hostage crisis at the prison, he was a strong advocate for the death penalty when he joined the unit. But years of counseling the inmates, getting to know them as human beings, and discovering that victims' families seldom got any sense of closure from the executions, took their toll on Pickett. Alienated and lonely, he confessed his private thoughts into audio cassettes after each execution. By the time he met convict Carlos De Luna, he had begun to oppose the death penalty.

Of all the inmates that claimed their innocence to Pickett, none had struck him as more genuine than De Luna. De Luna's arrest was made with very little evidence, and another convict, Carlos Hernandez, who was a virtual lookalike, even bragged about how De Luna was convicted for someone Hernandez had actually killed. Even a knife resembling Hernandez's distinctive one had been found at the scene. Frustrated at the futility and injustice of the executions, Pickett quit and became a dedicated anti-death penalty activist in Texas, an uphill battle if there ever was one. Texas leads the country in executions, ahead of second-place Virginia by more than 4 to 1 since 1976.

Through the investigation by Steve Mills and Maury Possley, two Chicago Tribune reporters, into De Luna's arrest and its inconsistencies, the filmmakers were led to De Luna's final confidant, Pastor Pickett. Directors Steve James and Peter Gilbert (directors of Hoop Dreams) give us a grim but fascinating look into the tortured soul of Pastor Pickett. Pickett's father, bitter over his own father's murder, was influential in forming the pastor's opinion of the death penalty in his youth. Raised to keep his emotions in constant check, he would record his misgivings after each execution, amassing a collection of 95 tapes over the years. But his daughter recalls the one time anyone in his family saw him weep, screeching as he collapsed to the floor, while his then young daughter helplessly looked on.

Gripping and intense, the documentary gives a fair-minded look at capital punishment, and one man's mission to find a better alternative.

IFC presents At the Death House Door tonight at 9 PM ET.

This entry first appeared on Blogcritics on 5/29/2008.

The Big Sleep: The Current State of Things and a Few Words on Glenn Kenny

by Tony Dayoub

So here is the current state of things around here. Got back from Tribeca a week ago when the following proceeded to occur:

• My laptop died. Thought it'd be a simple matter of replacing the hard drive and recovering some data from the old one. Turns out the whole motherboard is fried (or some such shit like that... I'm not the tech-savvy type) and the data is, to quote Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner, "lost... like tears in rain." Included in that data, pictures of my son's first Christmas. Lesson: Always back everything up.
• My cell phone is dying. Which has made it almost impossible to conduct business while I wait for my new laptop, since my cell was the only way I could answer email. Working on getting that replaced as well.
• My car could go any day now. Scary is hoping your car doesn't die out in Atlanta traffic with an unreliable cell phone to depend on.

The good news is that I've had plenty of time to watch a stack of screeners that was waiting for me when I got back from NYC. So you'll be getting plenty of reviews as soon as I'm back up, including:

• A survey of all the Indiana Jones material available out there as we approach the release of the new chapter: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Todd Haynes' look at Bob Dylan, I'm Not There
• Hilary Swank in the romance, P.S. I Love You
• A look at some new Sinatra material, out on DVD tomorrow
• Several documentaries like Surfwise, At the Death House Door, and When the Moors Ruled in Europe

Until then, let's talk about something else that has been on my mind. Premiere Magazine, a film magazine that started in France (and continues to be published there), was first published in the U.S. in 1987. Some have been critical of the American magazine for trivializing the art of film, i.e. concentrating on celebrities and box office tallies, and even putting out an annual list ranking the most powerful people in Hollywood. I was a subscriber from day one, and I can tell you that at fifteen, it was a considerable influence on my approach to analyzing cinema. Sure, if you were looking for scholarly examination of film in the context of world cinema you were probably better served by reading Film Comment (a publication I still enjoy greatly). But there was still room for Premiere's brand of journalism. Because though some would accuse it of trivializing the medium, I found it was honest in covering American film in the grander scheme of things, covering everything from independents to blockbusters, films to home videos, spotlighting actors both famous and obscure, and never letting you forget that though you may love film for its art, it was ultimately the business forces that decided if it would get made or not. Last year, Premiere, in the U.S., succumbed to the erosion of advertisement income now plaguing much of print media in the face of the rising popularity of the internet as news outlet. Many of the staff lost their jobs as it transitioned to a second life on the net, except one.

Glenn Kenny, the mag's resident film critic, continued in that capacity as the magazine became one of many entertainment sites that abound online. His singularly distinctive voice and style was one of the few reasons to continue to visit the site, as he also supplemented his reviews with a fantastic blog, "In the Company of Glenn". Not only does this man have an opinion (which I frequently disagreed with), but he is a master of the English language. You'd be surprised how few of those exist online. Here's an example of his way with words from his post on 4/21/08 entitled Monday Evening Palate Cleanser:

It vexes me. I am terribly vexed.

Why, on this mild Monday evening, do the words of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus echo through my head?

That's a rhetorical question. I know exactly why. That answer's multi-faceted. Part of my vexation stems from encountering, in this here blogosphere, a putative paean to a particularly distinguished work of cinema, which praises the particular work at the expense of practically every other movie the director of that work ever did, trotting out heavyweight quotes the better to swat at...David Denby, who recently had the temerity to cite said director's "refinement." What such score-settling has to do with the work at hand is, naturally, beyond me. But the score-settler seems to believe he's achieved the ambition of that character in Gass' "In The Heart of The Heart of The Country," which I guess is nice for him, not so nice for those turning to him for some wit or perception. And in thinking about all this, I further think, "Dude, you really want to get into it like this?" "It" being the week, after a weekend of examining some of the other discontents readily available in the film-appraisal corner of our world. And I answer, "No, I do not."

I bring up Mr. Kenny because Premiere just terminated his position. And as NPR reported on a story on the very day Kenny announced his departure, he is but the latest casualty in a long string of critics who've accepted buyouts or have been terminated from magazines and newspapers nationwide. So a site struggling to stand out from all the others just got rid of the one person who had the most potential to help them in doing so. And another veteran film critic loses his job because of ever increasing competition from bloggers who write more often, more incoherently, and often for free.

Though I am thankful for the immediacy, and facility, that the online world affords me in expressing my views on this subject I adore, cinema, I will always defer to journalists with formal training and experience when it comes to writing. Here's hoping that Mr. Kenny will land on his feet quickly, and get on with the business of provoking us to think on cinema from his perspective, no matter how often I may disagree with it.

An archive of Glenn Kenny's blog for Premiere, "In the Company of Glenn", is up, for the moment, under my Recommended Blogs to the left. His new writings may be found under a blog he set up, all by himself, called "Some Came Running", also under my Recommended Blogs.