Skip to main content

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Read more

Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Labels

Fallen Leaves (2023)

 



The key to this movie’s winning emotional delicacy is its formal sturdiness. Every shot has a specific job to do and does it well. The performances are measured and restrained.

What constitutes a perfect film? A perfect film doesn’t have to be in any particular genre, in any event. A perfect film knows what it’s about, knows what it wants to say, and knows that even when what it has to say is unusually simple, what it says can’t be reduced to words or any form of description apart from the thing itself. Which means that a perfect film has to be seen in order for its perfection to be appreciated.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a woman who works in a supermarket on an exploitative zero-hours contract, and resents that part of her job is to throw away perfectly good food at the end of the day; a sullen security guard clocks her giving stuff like this to desperate hungry people, and she is fired for trying to take home an expired sandwich.




Later Ansa finds herself in a karaoke bar where she meets a construction worker called Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), and there is a heartmelting connection between these two lonely people. They go on a very successful date to the cinema, although a subsequent series of terrible mishaps means that their relationship could be doomed – and here Kaurismäki may intend us to appreciate a filmic echo with An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Moreover, Holappa is a drinker, perhaps an alcoholic, and the booze brings out a nasty side.




    1. Tár scored 7.5 out of 10 on IMDb.
      Tár scored 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

    1. Release date: November 17, 2023 (USA)
      Director: Aki Kaurismäki
      Cinematography: Timo Salminen
      Distributed by: B-Plan Distribution, Pandora Film
      Finnish: Kuolleet lehdet




FILM DIRECTORS-AKI KAURISMAKI





Born in 1957 in Orimattila, Finland, Aki Kaurismäki is the undisputed master of deadpan cinema. Before finding his calling, he worked as a bricklayer, postman, and dishwasher—experiences that deeply inform his sympathetic portrayal of the working class. lKnown for his minimalist style, laconic humor, and unwavering focus on "losers" with dignity, Kaurismäki has carved out a unique space in world cinema. His Finland is a timeless place—often dubbed "Aki-land"—where 1950s cars, rockabilly music, and heavy silences coexist with modern struggles




















Labels:

Popular Posts