Day 24: A Christmas Story (1983)
& Christmas Story (2007, Finland)
“ Would you metformin hcl 1000 mg look at that? Would you look at THAT? It’s a leg!”
A Christmas Story is one of the countless family classics I could never be bothered to watch when I was a kid. I was always much too busy repeat viewing Godzilla Raids Again and Destroy All Monsters. Having never seen it, I had no idea what it was about and suspected nothing when I ordered a movie with the same title from the holiday movies section of Time Warner Cable’s On Demand service. Thing is, this Christmas Story was actually a completely different film, that translated into its native Finnish, is called Joulutarina.
Let’ s start metformin hydrochloride 500 mg side effects with the movie we all know (except me of course). Since I did not grow up watching A Christmas Story, I viewed it for the first time with none of the nostalgia that so many others hold for it. As such, I found it to be neither heartwarming nor funny and I believe that nostalgia must be a requirement to really enjoy this film. I can clearly see why someone with fond memories of watching it with the family every Christmas would revere A Christmas Story as a true childhood favorite, but that charm just didn’t work for me. The irony that the same could be said about any number of the beloved Showa series Godzilla films of my childhood is not lost on me. Touché, people.
Now for the one I watched by mistake. Joulutarina is the story of how a little orphan boy named Nikolas grew up to become Santa Claus. Even though this film was apparently made in 2007 I honestly believed I was watching A Christmas Story (1983) until darn well near the end of the movie. Again, I had literally no clue what the older film was about, and the Finnish production values and the video transfer provided by Time Warner gave it the appearance of something made in the 1970s-80s. Even the dubbed-in English dialogue did not clue me in, and this is coming from a guy who grew up watching Japanese monster films! As naïve as it sounds, I simply assumed there was a slight delay in the audio track compared to the video, which could account for the disparity in spoken word to lip movement.
Nikolas is a seven-year-old boy living with his parents and younger sister in a tiny fishing village somewhere in Europe and presumably a couple hundred years ago. One day his parents leave their cabin with his sister and never return. The villagers then convene to decide what to do with the boy. No one volunteers to take care of Nikolas, so they collectively come up with the astonishingly cruel idea of having each household take turns raising him for one year, and then schlepping him off to the next family every Christmas until he is old enough to take care of himself. Problem is, the village is so small that they run out of willing families by the time Nikolas is thirteen. Nobody wants a second go-around, so they send him off to live with an eccentric carpenter named “Crazy Isaac”. Nikolas is somewhat of an amateur carpenter himself, having started a tradition where he carves toys out of wood and leaves them on the doorstep for the children of all of his former families on Christmas Eve. He also leaves one present out on the ice where his real family died for his baby sister, who never got to experience a real Christmas. Isaac warms up to the boy after a while and finally gives in and helps him deliver the growing load of presents. Years later Isaac grows old and moves away, leaving his shop and all his tools to Nikolas. Nikolas grows a long beard and fashions himself the familiar red suit, and his Christmas toy-making tradition spreads to more villages every year. Eventually Nikolas too grows old, but his generosity and selflessness live on as the Christmas spirit and the Saint Nikolas of legend.
If you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy new Christmas movie for the family, it’s hard to do better than this.
