The always engaging Abbas Kiarostami will talk about his life and career in a special Directors Dialogue at the fiftieth New York Film Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium
111 Amsterdam Ave. at 66th St.
Saturday, October 6, $15, 6:00
Festival runs through October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
A decade ago, master Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa to come to the New York Film Festival to present his latest film, Ten. “It’s a terrible sign of what’s happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world,” festival director Richard Peña said at the time. Ten years later, Kiarostami (Close-Up, Taste of Cherry) will be making a special appearance at the fiftieth New York Film Festival, the last one organized by Peña, who is stepping down after twenty-five years. Kiarostami will be speaking with Brooklyn-born writer Phillip Lopate at the Bruno Walter Auditorium on October 6 at 6:00 as part of the HBO Directors Dialogue series. A visual artist who had an exceptional dual show at MoMA and PS1, “Image Maker,” in 2007, Kiarostami has brought the remarkable Like Someone to Love to this year’s festival; the film, set in Japan and featuring outstanding performances by Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanashi, will have its second and final screening October 8 at the Francesca Beale Theater. Kiarostami is a fascinating figure, a stylish cool cat in ever-present dark glasses who has an engaging knowledge of art and cinema that always makes for a lively discussion. The series continues October 7 with David Chase in conversation with Scott Foundas and October 13 with Robert Zemeckis speaking with Peña.
Inspired by his brief stint as a suburban New Jersey garage-band drummer with rock-and-roll dreams, Sopranos creator David Chase makes his feature-film debt with the musical coming-of-age drama Not Fade Away. Written and directed by Chase, the film focuses on Douglas (John Magaro), a suburban New Jersey high school kid obsessed with music and The Twilight Zone. It’s the early 1960s, and Douglas soon becomes transformed when he first hears the Beatles and the Stones — while also noticing how girls go for musicians, particularly Grace (Bella Heathcote), whom he has an intense crush on but who only seems to date guys in bands. When his friends Eugene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) ask him to join their group, Douglas jumps at the chance, but it’s not until he gets the opportunity to sing lead one night that he really begins to think that music — and Grace — could be his life. Not Fade Away has all the trappings of being just another clichéd sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll movie, but Chase and musical supervisor (and executive producer) Steven “Silvio” Van Zandt circumvent genre expectations and limitations by, first and foremost, nailing the music. Van Zandt spent three months teaching the main actors how to sing, play their instruments, and, essentially, be a band, making the film feel real as the unnamed group goes from British Invasion covers to writing their own song. Even Douglas’s fights with his conservative middle-class father (James Gandolfini) and his battle with Eugene over the direction of the band are handled with an intelligence and sensitivity not usually seen in these kinds of films. Not Fade Away does make a few wrong turns along the way, but it always gets right back on track, leading to an open-ended conclusion that celebrates the power, the glory, and, ultimately, the mystery of rock and roll. Not Fade Away is having its world premiere October 6 as the centerpiece of the fiftieth New York Film Festival before opening theatrically in December. In addition, Chase, a rather reserved man who is not always generous and forthcoming in interviews, will take part in an HBO Directors Dialogue on October 7 at 1:45, sitting down with festival selection committee member Scott Foundas.
Digging deep into Emily Brontё’s classic — and only — novel, writer-director Andrea Arnold creates a radically different Wuthering Heights from such previous versions starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (1939), Keith Michell and Claire Bloom (1962), and Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche (1992). Setting the bar high following her exceptional first two films, 
Lee Sang-woo, the Ogre of Korean Independent Cinema behind such cutting-edge, controversial low-budget films as Mother Is a Whore and Father Is a Dog, is back with the lame, lurid Fire in Hell. After being caught having a sexual tryst in a temple, a Korean monk winds up in a Filipino mansion, where a Christian minister attempts to rehabilitate a small group of violent criminals. The sex-obsessed monk, Ji-wol (Won Tae-hee), is soon in the midst of a torrid affair with Yeon-hwa (Cha Seung-min), the beautiful young woman who runs things at the mansion. Ji-wol says very little, but slowly, as the events that brought him to the Philippines reveal themselves in ever-more-graphic details, violence threatens to overwhelm everyone. Having trained on the sets of Kim Ki-duk’s Time and Breath, Lee certainly gained a knowledge of shock value, but his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. Fire in Hell is an incomprehensible misogynistic mess, a manipulative piece of trash as the writer, director, editor, actor, and agent provocateur tacks on more and more ridiculous scenes, leading to a whirlwind, tragedy-filled ending that couldn’t come soon enough. Fire in Hell purports to be about basic human desires and faith, but instead it’s an absurd erotic thriller without the thrills, not even worthy of being shown on late-night cable, although it was, remarkably, selected for the Jeonju and Moscow International Film Festivals. Fire in Hell is screening on September 30 at 5:30, concluding MoMA’s third annual “Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today” series, a collaboration with the 