Feel good Xmas movies

The S.O. and I are not much for watching holiday movies, especially the typical saccharine Lifetime or Hallmark ones, but we made an exception for Christmas film fare last night.

I happened across this movie being offered via Prime several months ago. I saved it to our Watch list because it's from Finland. Anything that's filmed in Finland with a big chunk of the dialogue in Finnish goes on the list. It gives the S.O. a chance to listen to actual Finnish and to realize again just how incredibly helpless he'd probably be if we ever went to Finland and had to count on his linguistic skills. Finn may be his first language (he learned to speak English -- sort of -- in kindergarten) but he doesn't have many opportunities to speak it. (I can read a fair amount of simple Finn, and I recognize quite a bit when I hear it spoken but I gave up trying to speak it years ago.)

Anyway, so I found a Finnish holiday movie, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Saved it with a vague plan of watching it once it got closer to the holidays. It has cute little kids, reindeer, lots of snow -- definitely all the ingredients for something sweet. Especially when it emerges that centuries ago the Sami people interred the original Santa Claus in a mountain in Lapland. A rich American decides to dig him up.

That's when things get interesting.

It turns out the truth about Santa Claus comes a lot closer to the stories about Krampus than to the ones about Saint Nicholas.

This being a Finnish movie, the fact there are subtitles shouldn't deter anyone. No one is going to get stuck trying to read super long sentences while characters blather on and on. Actually, the biggest problem with subtitles when a person understands (sort of) the language being spoken is subtitles tend to clean things up. A character says something bluntly vulgar and it appears on the screen as "disgusting" instead of "shit."

Rare Exports isn't exactly Cannes Film Festival material, but it was fun. I mean, how much better can it get than the image of a little boy sitting up holding a long gun bigger than he is waiting to blow away Santa Claus if he tries coming through the window? I'm not sure what type of weaponry it is, but it's definitely not a Red Ryder bb gun. Or his father freaking out when he tries to get a fire going in the fireplace and triggers the ginormous bear trap the kid set there?