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2 articles from 2008

28 October 2008 9:01 PM, PDT | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »

It's a little strange to single out three of Aki Kaurismäki's earliest films as his "proletariat trilogy"; that's akin to roping a few Alfred Hitchcock movies into a "suspense trilogy." The Finnish director has always made the outcast and downtrodden his people, and his eccentric, minimalist tragicomedies speak to their struggles and honor their dreams. Each film in the "proletariat trilogy," now collected under Criterion's stripped-down Eclipse line, takes a different tack (romantic comedy, deadpan crime drama, revenge), but all are committed to showing how the working poor scrape together a living on factory lines, in trash pickups, and the odd port job. Kaurismäki's third film, 1986's Shadows In Paradise, created a solid prototype for many projects to follow—a short, bleak, yet oddly hopeful and sweet-natured tale that incorporates a soundtrack loaded with vintage American blues, Finnish pop music, and jukebox rock 'n' roll. Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen, …

- Scott Tobias

23 September 2008 11:36 AM, PDT | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

By Michael Atkinson

When we first met Aki Kaurismäki, in 1989 when "Ariel" had its run as probably the first Finnish film to play theatrically in America since Jörn Donner's "Portraits of Women" (1970), we more or less fell in love. Lost in the hollow skull of the Reagan-Bush '80s, suffering the ascension of Spielberg and Ivan Reitman and Shane Black, wondering what remote atoll international art cinema had escaped to, and more or less completely ignorant of Finnish life, we had every reason to embrace this last of the red hot deadpan existentialists, whose films somehow altered the cellular structure of working class depression and turned it into cool comedy. His distinctively bittersweet dyspepsia established Kaurismäki, in a thick run of films that included "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) and "La Vie de Bohème" (1992), as a new arthouse brand name, a kind of vodka-weary Bresson-meets-Tati.

Kaurismäki …

- Michael Atkinson

2 articles from 2008