The 5 Essential Thanksgiving Movies
Our speedometer has melted and as a result it's very hard to see with any degree of accuracy exactly how fast we were going.
We're just a few days away from Thanksgiving. Families all over the country will reunite to eat, drink, be merry, and argue politics - then give up and sit in front of the tv. It's tradition! But what do you watch after the parade's done and all the football games have ended? Christmas movies? Don't start those just yet - here are some options for true Thanksgiving cinema.
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973)
All our hero can cook is cold cereal and maybe toast. Is Charlie Brown doomed? Not when Linus, Snoopy and Woodstock chip in to save the (Thanksgiving) Day.
I'm probably cheating by already including a television special and not a movie, but for many folks and their families, mine included, it's not Thanksgiving without A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.
The Peanuts holiday specials, especially their trio of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas tales, make them a household staple for a few months out of every year. All of them, in one way or another, are about the holidays gone wrong, and even though this one features a pretty major Peppermint Patty meltdown when she sees that the Thanksgiving menu consists of jelly beans, popcorn, and buttered toasts, she gets put in her place by her old pal Marcie.
"Did he invite you here to dinner or did you invite yourself and us too?" she says. If Thanksgiving is about being thankful for what we have, we should practice that at the backyard feast, even if that means saying grace for the jelly beans served by a dog. Just be thankful that you have a place to go.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
An irritable marketing executive, Neal Page, is heading home to Chicago for Thanksgiving when a number of delays force him to travel with a well meaning but overbearing shower curtain ring salesman, Del Griffith.
This is the single most common answer to the question, "What are the best Thanksgiving movies?" It's a movie that many folks return to year after year, an annual tradition as essential as pumpkin pie and football.
I'm here to challenge that notion. Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as the title suggests, is about holiday travel gone wrong. A plane is diverted, a train breaks down, a rental car explodes - I don't exactly see how it's fun for the whole family. Who wants to watch a movie that's so darn stressful? This must be regular viewing for families that don't have to travel very far to get together. As someone who is getting on four planes over the next five days (and, if you can't guess, watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles for the very first time in anticipation of writing this list), I can't imagine much worse.
I'm still including it on this list, of course, because regardless of my personal feelings, it is capital-T The Thanksgiving movie for so many. Steve Martin and John Candy work so well off each other, John Hughes wrote and directed movies like this in his sleep, and it makes for a fun game of "Name that random actor!" - it's a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon cheat code.
The Last Waltz (1978)
Martin Scorsese's documentary intertwines footage from "The Band's" incredible farewell tour with probing backstage interviews and featured performances by Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and other rock legends.
The Last Waltz was filmed on November 26, 1978 - Thanksgiving Day - at the farewell concert for the band The Band. It's a family gathering of sorts, a Rolodex-utilizing reunion of popular music's most brilliant minds and most talented musicians. It gives you that special "everybody in the same place at the same time" feeling that you only feel around the holidays. Except my chosen family doesn't include Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Mavis Staples, Muddy Waters, and Ringo Starr.
It's a musical potluck.
A family member recently told me that he watches The Last Waltz around every Thanksgiving. And I can totally see why this Scorsese picture exemplifies the holiday for a lot of people even beyond the family reunion angle. It's a bittersweet, emotional, memory-lane strolling, beer-drinking cigarette-smoking hangout with people you don't always want to hang out with. The Band's music, a fascinating catalog of post-rockabilly Americana (I dare you to not become obsessed with the way drummer Levon Helm sings the lyric "Wait a minute, Chester" in the song "The Weight" - it's impossible), feels autumnal and nostalgic and timeless. Oh, and don't forget - THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD!
Thanksgiving (2023)
After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts - the birthplace of the holiday. Picking off residents one by one, what begins as random revenge killings are soon revealed to be part of a larger, sinister holiday plan.
We needed a good Thanksgiving horror movie. For years, it was the skipped-over holiday in genre cinema (because it's become the skipped-over holiday in real life - I get it, I'm not the biggest turkey guy either), inconspicuously nestled between John Carpenter's Halloween and Bob Clark's Black Christmas.
When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez crafted their Grindhouse double feature in 2007 (for more information on what the heck I'm talking about, click here to read about my experience seeing it for the first time earlier this year), one of the fake exploitation trailers was an Eli Roth-created, '70s-set Thanksgiving slasher, inspired by those previously mentioned horror classics. So many of those trailers ended up being proofs-of-concept for feature films, like when Rodriguez made a full-length Machete and we actually got a Hobo with a Shotgun movie, and after a long wait, Roth finally made Thanksgiving (I'm still holding out hope that Rob Zombie will make Werewolf Women of the SS).
It's no longer a '70s slasher and is instead a self-aware commentary on consumerism and greed - there's an extended Black Friday gone wrong opening scene that's both over-the-top disgusting and totally believable. It's a rare kind of movie, a slasher with more to say and what it does say is actually interesting, while also still being pretty fun. And it instantly became the best Thanksgiving horror movie - sorry, Thankskilling, I haven't seen you but I'm sure you're bad.
The House of Yes (1997)
Jackie-O is anxiously awaiting the visit of her brother home for Thanksgiving, but isn't expecting him to bring a friend — and she's even more shocked to learn that this friend is his fiance. It soon becomes clear that her obsession with Jackie Kennedy is nothing compared to her obsession with her brother, and she isn't the only member of the family with problems.
I have saved the weirdest and freakiest movie for last. If you wanted warm hug cinema, you've got it. Stop reading. The House of Yes is not that in any way, shape, or form.
In this Sundance darling and Razzie Award winner, Parker Posey plays a delusional, Jackie O-obsessed, sex-driven siren whose obsession with her brother gives dysfunctional families a bad name. To say anything else would spoil the fun, but that sentence is either going to convince you or it isn't.
I first read The House of Yes (it was originally a play by Wendy MacLeod) during my freshman year of college and it was a lightbulb-pinging script for me. It relishes in society's moral grey areas, somehow both sexy and perverted, both romantic and repulsive, piercingly satiric and devastatingly traumatic. If you want your family to be mad at you for years to come (and you'll probably forever lose remote privileges as well), throw this one on after the parade or 5K or turkey dinner.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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