Interview: Director Juho Kuosmanen on Finnish Oscar Entry 'The Happiest Day in The Life Of Olli Mäki'

By Jose Solís.


In 1962, a young Finnish boxer faced featherweight champion of the world Davey Moore in a match that would go down in sports history as one of the most bittersweet for the tiny European country. Director Juho Kuosmanen has captured the event from the perspective of the challenger (played by Jarkko Lahti in a breakthrough) who finds himself vanishing among the excitement and pressure of the fight. The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki is a bittersweet tale about our need to create larger than life personalities that help us fulfill our desires, but fail to fulfill those who are actually participating in the experience. We see the sensitive, but quiet, Olli light up when he’s with his girlfriend Raija (Oona Airola), even though his manager Eelis (Eero Milonoff) suggests she will only make him lose the fight. Despite that the film is about a boxer, it has more in common with melancholy romances like Jules and Jim and Roman Holiday, than with Raging Bull. The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival where it picked up the Prize Un Certain Regard, since then it went on to become the Finnish Oscar entry, so I spoke to director Kuosmanen about the parallels between the film and his life, shooting in black and white, and entering the craze of awards season.

Read the interview after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Beauty vs Beast: Grassy Knoll Ethics

Jason from MNPP here with an under-the-weather edition of "Beauty vs Beast" - apologies if I am brief and lacking some spark today, I'm staring at my computer screen from the business end of a box of kleenex and with one too many sudafed capsules dotting my system. I bring up my sickness not to be (entirely) self-indulgent but to explain why I didn't make it out to see Jackie this weekend as I'd planned - every cough feels like a cinematic betrayal right now.

So until me and Natalie can rendezvous with our matching pink pillboxes I will ask you today to look backwards at the previous biggest Kennedy assassination movie on the books, Oliver Stone's JFK. I don't remember the Oscar race that year but I'm kind of surprised Costner wasn't nominated for the film - maybe they'd had their fill with Dances With Wolves the year before? Tommy Lee Jones was nominated for the movie though, for the poodle-mopped conspiracy sissy at the center of the mystery, and so I ask you...

PREVIOUSLY We're on an Almodovar kick thanks to the retrospective at MoMA right now so last week we climbed into bed and slipped our hands into the sex ropes for Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! - he took 56% of the vote over Victoria Abril's 44. Said thefilmjunkie:

"If I were voting with my head I'd probably go for Marina, but my vote for Ricky was guided by more, um, prurient interests. I have no shame. I regret nothing."

"Don't call me 'baby'! "

...I'm not your baby."

Great Moments in Screen Bitchery #283
Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface (1983)

Oscar Chart Updates ~ What's Happening to Jackie?

As promised we're updating the Oscar charts more often. With the first avalanche of awardage the ground is shifting, if not quite seismically. It's been a very good week for three things in particular: Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and Isabelle Huppert ... and even a good week for, um, Hacksaw Ridge. And you'll see a new lock or two on a few of the charts.

Awards season giveth and awards season taketh away...

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: Design Inspires Van Gogh in Lust for Life

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Kirk Douglas nearly drove himself over the edge while filming Lust for Life, inhabiting the character of Vincent van Gogh with a tenacity akin to the Method. The result was an Oscar nomination, likely the closest he ever came to a win. His emotionally volatile performance lends real weight to the oft-sensationalized biography of history’s most famously mad artist.

But the success of Lust for Life isn’t owed entirely to Douglas. Director Vincente Minnelli was a perfect match for the material, which necessitates a balance between the beauty that Van Gogh saw in the world and the feverish passion that drove him away from it. The Oscar-nominated production design team, led by frequent Minnelli collaborator Cedric Gibbons, offer a rich vision of the French countryside that serves as an essential counterpoint to Douglas’s madness.

Click to read more ...