Aki Kaurismäki

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Ariel (1988)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiComedyCrimeFinland

    Quote:
    Aki Kaurismäki’s first feature, Crime And Punishment (1983), updated and transplanted Dostoyevsky’s novel to present day Finland. Since then, the deadpan auteur has written, directed and edited some 20 films, which is about a fifth of Finland’s cinematic output since the Eighties. His films, however, have always proven more popular abroad than at home. Apart from Britain, few nations like to see their own follies, iniquities and all-round miserabilism being paraded in affectionately mocking entertainments, and Kaurismäki’s focus is very much on the dark absurdities of his motherland’s down-and-outs, drunks and dispossessed.Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Varjoja paratiisissa aka Shadows In Paradise (1986)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiComedyDramaFinland

    Quote:
    In Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, limbo is imagined as a place where no one ever smiles, where furnishings and cars all seem second-hand, where the colours are all drab and faded. “Everything’s the same here,” as one character puts it, “but it’s just a little worse.”Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Rikos ja rangaistus aka Crime and Punishment (1983)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiCrimeDramaFinland

    Quote:
    An adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, set in modern Helsinki. Slaughterhouse worker Rahikainen murders a man, and is forced to live with the consequences of his actions.

    Aki Kaurismäki’s narrative directorial debut. He chose this project after reading François Truffaut’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, where Hitchcock claimed Crime and Punishment was the one book he would never adapt, because “it would be to difficult.” Kaurismäki later admitted it was too difficult.Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Hamlet liikemaailmassa AKA Hamlet Goes Business (1987)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiArthouseComedyFinland

    Quote:
    A bizarre black-and-white film noir reworking of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. After the death of his father, young Hamlet inherits a seat on the board of a company controlled by his uncle that decides to move into the rubber duck market. But Hamlet is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his father’s death…Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiComedyCultFinland

    Quote:
    Somewhere in the tundra lives the worst rock and roll band in the world…. Aki Kaurismäki`s hilarious road movie follows the fortunes and misadventures of a struggling Siberian rock band, the Leningrad Cowboys.

    A local promoter, stunned by the band`s lack of talent, advises them instead to try their luck in America. Accompanied by their autocratic manager, the Cowboys travel to New York, learning English on the plane. Sporting outsixe Quiffs, dark shades and outrageously long winkle-pickers, they are passed off as Americans. Jim Jarmusch, in a cameo role as a shifty car salesman, sells them an old Cadillac. The band strap their frozen bass player to the roof in a coffin full of beer, and head south….Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Calamari Union (1985)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiArthouseComedyFinland

    Quote:
    Fourteen desperate men named Frank, band together to escape from a repressive section of Helsinki. An English-speaking non-Frank named Pekka joins the barroom conspirators, whose avoidance of last names, and any affect, help them outsmart overwhelming forces as they sneak through dark subway tunnels and alleys, hoping against despair to reach magical seaside Eira. The Calamari Unionists take advantage of unending night to venture their intrepid journey.Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö aka The Match Factory Girl (1990)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiComedyDramaFinland

    Quote:
    A woman’s terribly dull life is upended by a one-night stand pregnancy, causing her to seek retribution.Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Le Havre (2011)

    2011-2020Aki KaurismäkiComedyDramaFinland

    Synopsis:
    A dock worker in Le Havre hears a human sound inside one of the containers in port, that container which left Gabon three weeks ago and which was supposed to arrive in London five days after its departure from Gabon, which didn’t happen. The Le Havre police and French border guards find a still alive group of illegal African immigrants inside. On the sign from one of his elders, a young teen boy among the illegal immigrants manages to escape, news of which hits the local media. The first friendly face that boy, Idrissa, encounters is that of former artist now aged shoeshine Marcel Marx. Marcel decides to help Idrissa by hiding him in his house, news which slowly trickles through his community of friends – most of whom he associates with at his local bar – and neighbors, most who assist Marcel in this task.Read More »

  • Aki Kaurismäki – Hamlet liikemaailmassa AKA Hamlet Goes Business (1987) (HD)

    1981-1990Aki KaurismäkiArthouseComedyFinland

    Quote:
    A sardonic and irreverent contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business is an idiosyncratically whimsical, yet incisive satire on corporate greed, materialism, corruption, and vengeance. Shot in black and white and employing high contrast lighting, the film achieves an atmospheric noir that reflects Aki Kaurismäki’s irrepressibly droll sense of humor and penchant for understated irony. Kaurismäki incorporates traditional, often manipulative and hackneyed stylistic devices of lush, overarching music, directed stage lighting, expressionistic gestures, skewed camera angles, and meticulously composed slow motion shots in order to playfully subvert dramatic convention: Lauri’s angered departure from Hamlet’s office; Hamlet’s self-consciously tormented delivery of a poem to Ophelia; the overdramatic, but anticlimactic plot device of the Murder of Gonzago play-within-a-play episode to expose Klaus’s treachery; the exquisite choreography of Ophelia’s final moments of despair. By integrating muted emotion with exaggerated theatricality, Kaurismäki creates a delirious and incongruent fusion of highbrow art film and pop culture kitsch – a patently iconoclastic comedic tragedy on indecision, inertia, and alienation.
    (filmref.com)Read More »

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