Yulefright

Restaurants all over Australia, especially in solidly built regional hotels with big fireplaces and frosty mountains beyond their french windows, are busy this weekend with Christmas in July, a through and through foodie celebration devoid of any religious connotations whatsoever. It's all about stuffing oneself with those hot, rich, filling meals traditionally eaten with gusto on Xmas Day in the Northern Hemisphere but which practically make you gag when forced down in the heat of a December down under. It's a practical response to the ludicrousness of transferring traditions developed for a winter festival to the exact opposite season.

Anyway, I'll seize this topic-related opportunity to mention a film I've been meaning to recommend for a while, well, since Christmas 2011 to be precise - the 2010 Finnish movie Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. It's the funniest, darkest, goriest, most bad taste and frightening yuletide tale I've ever seen that also manages to maintain a core of childhood innocence and seasonal sweetness. A movie like Bad Santa touches a few of those bases, but, let's face it, the scope of most Xmas movies is small and suburban. This film exists elsewhere. Its brooding atmosphere is heightened by featuring a geographically isolated people embedded in a stunning but pitiless environment that kills careless folk, and a society shaped by a palpable continuation of their pagan past well into the present. Their Christmas myths are most definitely not our jolly Xmasy traditions. Simply not getting gifts didn't cut it as fitting punishment for naughty children according to the tough, barbaric peoples of yore, and the ur-customs developed to keep young folk in line make you laugh as much in disbelief as in horror at the outrageous cruelty.

Also, you have to love a movie that casually features countless filthy and very sinister, naked old men with such abandon. As with most Nordic horror films, there's much blood and guts nicely framed so as to contrast with the snow. There are chainsaws, there are guns everywhere, there are borderline psychotic but lovable local characters, and there is much seriously questionable behaviour as well as a moving father-son relationship. What more could you want from a Christmas movie?

Now I'd better get a move on. I have to gussy up (put on something other than trackie dacks) and meet up with a few people, not for a Yulefest (at least, I hope not... ), but for a normal Sunday arvo lunch.