Hot Docs Day Six. No more exclamation points.

Okay, I am quite sure I will hate documentaries by next week. I cannot take it anymore. I have now missed several films that I was very excited about at this time last week. I am very fickle!

At the Death House Door looks at the life of Carroll Pickett, a pastor who was charged with counseling men on death row in the Texas state prison. He saw 95 men put to death by lethal injection until he withdrew from the system and became a vocal opponent of the death penalty. The film focuses on his experiences with Carlos De Luna, a man who Pickett was sure was innocent when he spent his last day with him in the death house. Pickett works with De Luna's family and two Chicago Tribune reporters in an effort to clear De Luna's name, and the filmmakers follow it all.

The story is interesting and I found the material between Pickett and his children particularly engaging, but the film is so sentimental in it's treatment that I found it off putting. Death House is quite a good documentary and biography, but it is also the new feature from Steve James, who was responsible for Hoop Dreams and Stevie. Those latter two films are among the best documentaries ever made, so it was hard to be anything but disappointed in this one. A solid doc, but not up to the level of his previous work.

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Then I hit the Scandinavian Party at Circa, the most garish/ retarded club in all of Toronto. I was really looking to this one, but both anticipating and attending it were terrible mistakes. For one, Circa is nausea inducing when there are few enough people to make out the terrible decor. This might not have been a problem considering the number of people there, but everyone is shuttled into a tiny holding pen of a room in the corner of the club. It is a thousand degrees and everyone is grumpy. Thank god I'm next to the bar so I can get a cool, refreshing drink. Say, what awesome Scandinavian themed drinks are being served here? Oh, bottles of Budweiser? Awesome. I head for the door about fifteen minutes later. I skipped Stranded for this!

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And it gets worse. The midnight show tonight is The Rise and Fall of Grumpy Burger. Documentarian Matt Gallagher turns his camera into his friend and fellow filmmaker Marshall Sfalcin to document his next project. Sfalcin typically creates micro-budget horror and thriller stories, but he intends to make a feature telling the story of his grandfather's invention on fast food with his small chain of Hi Ho restaurants. A documentary on that subject could be interesting. A documentary on someone else trying to capture that subject is less interesting. A "documentary" featuring Sfalcin constantly mugging for his buddy's camera is an extremely grating experience. Sfalcin and Gallagher both seem to be in love with Sfalcin's performing, so he never turns it off. The entire movie reeks of play acting, set up, and artifice. Unbearable.

Posted on 04/25/08 by: Aaron 04:54 PM