DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
How much do we really know about this “Santa Claus” fellow anyway? Recluse, obsessed with kids, employs a massive force of diminutive slaves, annual violator of any number of international aerospace regulations; has Homeland Security checked this guy out? If they had, they might have uncovered some rather unsavory elements of the Santa mythology. (Sorry, under-10 readers, I meant Santa history.) In Finland, turns out he may have been the same character as the “Yule Goat”, a horned creature that demanded offerings and was more of the tough love school when it came to getting the kiddies to behave.
That’s the legend that Rare Exports chases down, as director Jalmari Helander expands on a pair of related shorts to make his first feature film, about a geological dig into a mountain just on the Russian side of the Russia-Finland border that unearths a version of Santa Claus which Norman Rockwell never envisioned in his wildest nightmares, along with a legion of rather surprising-looking elves. The only ones who can stop this Demon Claus from flaying the children of earth from within an inch of their lives for the naughtiness? A gang of reindeer ranchers and a little boy.
It’s not quite horror, though its got creepy elements — but most of all, this is just a lot of imaginative fun — even if the low budget means that Helander has to kind of skip past the big climactic reveal of what is essentially an old-fashioned monster movie. This has the goofy, kid-empowering spirit of 80s flicks like Gremlins or The Goonies, though the content is just disturbing enough (not to mention the amount of full-frontal septuagenarian nudity) that you probably don’t want to bring your eight-year old. But if you’re looking for something seasonal with a wicked twist, this is a welcome break from endless, stab-inducing repetitions of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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In 1968, the women who made car seat covers at Ford’s assembly plant in Dagenham, a surburb of London, went on strike after being told that they weren’t skilled laborers and that they they weren’t going to get paid the same as men doing comparable work that the plant did deem “skilled.” The result was the passage of the U.K.’s 1970 Equal Pay Act, which prohibited gender-based pay disparities for similar work. This film dramatizes the events of the strike, casting the always-excellent Sally Hawkins (probably best known, in the U.S., anyway, for her lead role in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky) as Rita O’Grady, who leads the strike. Also of note: lefty folk/punk icon and tireless union booster Billy Bragg supplies the lyrics to the film’s theme song, which is sung by 60s British pop star Sandie Shaw — herself a Dagenham employee some years before the events of the film.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.
