Provincetown event showcases Tarantino — and Madonna's debut
Every year the Provincetown International Film Festival goes searching the world for movies. It brings home the shorts and dramatic and documentary features that suit its sensibility - gayish, womanish, issue-oriented, overwhelmingly independent. A lot of them have played other festivals, but come June, they're probably new to you.
And each year more stars show up. Yet this underrated festival never gets terribly star-struck. Drag artist Varla Jean Merman is every inch as head-turning as Gael Garcia Bernal, who's receiving the Excellence in Acting award and will present his directorial debut, "Deficit." The comic actor Jane Lynch is getting the Faith Hubley memorial award.
The main attraction, when the festival begins Wednesday, bigger perhaps - perhaps - than the opening-night unveiling of Madonna's directorial debut, is the arrival of Quentin Tarantino, who's receiving the festival's Filmmaker on the Edge award. Tarantino is the honor's 10th recipient - after John Waters, who's virtually the mayor (he lives in town), Christine Vachon, Gus Van Sant, and Jim Jarmusch. Provincetown is showing "Pulp Fiction" in celebration. Below are other highlights from this year's program.
"Ballast" In Lance Hammer's realist drama, three people in the Mississippi Delta - a mother, her young son, and his father's twin brother - try to find a way to get by psychologically and financially after a tragedy. One of the year's best movies and a fierce example of the emotional depths and artistic heights independent American movies can reach.
"The Axe in the Attic" After Hurricane Katrina Ed Pincus and Lucia Small drove from New England to New Orleans and made this devastating cinéma-vérité documentary featuring the outraged, displaced, and heartbroken people they met along the way. But Pincus and Small wind up at the film's ethical center: Does their own outrage compromise their filmmaking? It actually makes their movie stronger.
"Be Like Others" For your trivia night: Which Islamic republic considers homosexuality a condition punishable by death but approves of sex change operations? Tanaz Eshaghian's fascinating documentary unpacks the contradiction in that stance and examines how transsexuality has saved the lives of a lot of gay men. (By the way, the answer is Iran.)
"Towelhead" Alan Ball's first project since HBO's "Six Feet Under" is this adaptation of Alicia Erian's novel in which an Arab teenager (Summer Bishil) juggles her hormones with her daddy issues in a small Texas town during the first Gulf War. The cast includes Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, and Peter Macdissi, who played Olivier, the kinky, possibly insane art teacher on Ball's show.
"Story of Women" It seems everyone's forgotten Claude Chabrol's astonishing 20-year-old film with a reliably opaque Isabelle Huppert as an abortionist in Nazi-occupied France - everyone except Waters. He's presenting this unhappy tale, whose director is in exacting if morally abstract form, presumably for us to make up our minds.
"Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story" Jeffrey Schwarz's documentary tracks the life and career of Castle, the cheeky horror director and publicity-stunt pioneer. The movies - "The House on Haunted Hill," "Mr. Sardonicus," "13 Ghosts," and "The Tingler," for which Castle had a shock buzzer installed in the theater's seats - are kitschy little numbers now. But in the 1950s and '60s, if you wanted to see Joan Crawford as a nutbag ax murderer ("Strait Jacket"), there was only one man for the job.
"The Black List" If you can't wait until August to see prominent African-Americans - from Toni Morrison to Chris Rock - talk about black life in America in this HBO documentary, then get thee to Provincetown. One of the directors is the film critic Elvis Mitchell.
"Phyllis and Harold" Cindy Kleine has fashioned her family home movies, some interviews, and animation into a documentary about her parents's tempestuous marriage. It took her 12 years to make, and nobody could see it until her father, Harold, died.
"Deficit" For his first film as a director, Bernal decides to explore the issues of class that arise at a weekend house among elite Mexicans whose attitudes and behavior he scrutinizes. Since Bernal also plays one of the more privileged characters, expect some degree of self-examination, too.
"Guest of Cindy Sherman" One of Sherman's exes, Paul H-O, has coauthored a documentary about life in the banal old art industry and his life in the mysterious Sherman's shadow. He says he hated that he felt like a wife. The feminists bare their fangs. Compelling for its conflation of opportunism and self-therapy.
"Filth and Wisdom" It's taken long enough for Madonna to direct a feature and now, with this comedy about three London roommates, she has. The early word out of the Berlin Film Festival was not completely terrible. The film critic Dennis Lim reported that Mrs. Guy Ritchie might be the best filmmaker in her family.
