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For a holiday that consists of sitting on your ass while staring at the TV, then sitting on your ass at a table, before returning your ass (now larger) to the couch—there's a startling dearth of Thanksgiving movies.
You'd think that by this time Garry Marshall would've lined up an all-star ensemble for Thanksgiving, featuring myriad subplots like Ashton Kutcher having a meet-cute with Emma Stone as they argue over a store's last turkey or some shit. Or Eli Roth would've made good on his fake Thanksgiving-themed trailer from Grindhouse.
But nope. Your options for actual Thanksgiving-themed entertainment is limited to the depressive laments of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a sub-Dreamworks animated film called Free Birds and a slasher series called ThanksKilling that makes Roth look like Nicholas Roeg.
That makes the Jodie Foster-directed Home for the Holidays (screening Monday at the Clinton) officially the second-best Thanksgiving movie of all time, trailing John Hughes' Planes, Trains and Automobiles by at least a dining-room table.
Second-best is no small feat, even in a slim field. But perhaps for being true to life, Home for the Holidays is often overlooked. Like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, it's a film with a rogues' gallery of shitty relatives, though here they're bombarding a frumpy, depressive Holly Hunter as she reluctantly returns to Baltimore for the holiday. There is a hateful sister, an eccentric gay brother (Robert Downey Jr., pretty damned perfect), wacky aunts, stressed parents and all manner of dysfunction.
Perhaps the reason that Home isn't embraced as Thanksgiving Day fodder is that it really sets the table (sorry!) for hyper-analyzing your own experience. This is, after all, a movie about a family of opposites who eventually explode their emotional baggage all over the table. Is that really the movie you want to watch as you prepare for your drunk uncle to rant about Obamacare while you try to eat pie?
The curse of Home for the Holidays is that it's too authentic for its own good, a film that holds the mirror up a little too close. View it alone. It's wonderful as mandatory Thanksgiving-eve prep-viewing. Not so much while you're sitting on the couch flanked by the archetypes depicted onscreen.
Maybe that's why Americans watch so much football on Thanksgiving. The volume drowns out your company instead of holding a pre-dinner microscope to Uncle Joe's flaws.
SEE IT: Home for the Holidays screens at the Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Monday, Nov. 23.
Also Showing:
OMSI's Film + Music series transitions from cool series to unofficial film festival this week, and holy shit is there a lot going on. Screenings on Portland's biggest and loudest screen include Purple Rain (Wednesday), the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis (Thursday), Talking Heads concert masterpiece Stop Making Sense (Thursday), Easy Rider (Friday), Dazed & Confused (Saturday), Saturday Night Fever (Saturday), The Sound of Music (Sunday), Martin Scoresese's Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light (Sunday), and much, much more. See OMSI.edu for full listings.
Long before Rick Grimes and co. turned zombies into soap-opera fuel. Bela Legosi was using voodoo magic to turn the woman of his dreams into a brainless slave in 1932's White Zombie. Joy Cinema. 9:15 pm Wednesday, Nov. 18.
Church of Film unearths Hard to be a God, the tale of an intergalactic historian sent back to the Middle Ages to document civilization. Oh, and Werner Herzog shows up, because that's mandated in all West-German psychedelic freakouts from the '80s. Clinton Street Theater. 8 pm Wednesday, Nov. 18.
Opera Theater Oregon presents a restoration of the Catherine Deneuve-starring French romance The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, preceeded by live French cabaret music. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Friday, Nov. 20.
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure may not be the perfect Tim Burton, what with its slightly creepy protagonist, stop-motion monsters, evil clowns, tilted angles and Danny Elfman score, but… oh wait, nope. This is the perfect Tim Burton film. Kennedy School. Friday-Thursday, Nov. 20-26.
The Association of Moving Image Archivists National Conference is in town (get ready, strip clubs, because these dudes PARTY), and to celebrate the NW is hosting a series of screenings, including an archival presentation of historic film (Thursday), 1990's LGBTQ celebration Paris is Burning (Friday), This is Cinerama (Saturday), a documentary about the old screening format, and other stuff that will be really, really exciting to folks who complain about aspect ratio issues. NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium. Thursday-Saturday, Nov. 19-21.
Before David Gordon Green burst out with a series of stoner comedies (Pineapple Express being a classic, Your Highness being the opposite of "classic"), he was making quiet indie dramas, highlighted by 200'3 All the Real Girls, a small-town romance laced with an oddball sensibility that transcends its mumblecore brethren. 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 & 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, Nov. 27-29.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail returns to Portland theaters, offering a strong argument as to why we eat turkey instead of rabbit for Thanksgiving. Laurelhurst Theater. Friday-Thursday, Nov. 20-26.
Sure, 1994's screwball throwback The Hudsucker Proxy is a lesser Coen Brothers movie. But I'll take lesser Coens to most filmmakers' best any day. Academy Theater. Friday-Thursday, Nov. 20-26.
Cinema Classics pays tribute to the late, great Maureen O'Hara with a screening of John Ford's 1941 downer/classic How Green was my Valley, a drama centered around a Welsh coal-mining family at the turn of the 20th century. Hollywood Theatre. 2 pm Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 21-22.
George Lucas' debut film, 1970's THX-1130, is presented in 35mm format, which contains zero digitally added Ewoks. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Monday, Nov. 23.
The Grindhouse Film Fest is back with I Drink Your Blood, a 1970 splatterfest featuring acid-fueled Satanic hippies with rabies. And yes, it's amazing. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Nov. 24.
Willamette Week