A few weeks ago, I talked about how the U.S. subliminally jumps right over Thanksgiving and focuses its sights on Christmas the second Halloween wraps up. Sure enough, in the weeks following, we have been flooded with mediocre Christmas commercials riddled with terrible remixed music choices, messages of blind consumerism and even AI generation.
At least the M&M's commercial I've seen from inside a crib is still alive and well in 2024. I would rather have companies do this than uninventive restatements of last year's cash grab.
So why not spend this semester's final article (and my editor's final Trop installment) talking about Thanksgiving movies and their problems because there are a lot of them.
First, I am not accepting the “Die Hard” clause in that just because there's a cute scarecrow in the front yard or there's a scene where someone makes stuffing DOES NOT mean that it's a Thanksgiving movie.
So, this excludes "The Blind Side," "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Mall Cop" and many, many others that just happen to take place in the fall and get thrown into the 'Thanksgiving Movie' category.
Let’s look at two examples of Thanksgiving movies that had no right being greenlit, produced and released; like how did nobody stop and say, “hey guys, it’d be better if we just cut our losses before this overwhelmingly expensive third act that isn’t necessary at all for a holiday about baking and giving compliments” during the sixth month of production?
First up is a movie that’s genre has only been around for five years: “Thanksgiving.” Yeah, the miserably bad slasher that has a pilgrim theme, THAT “Thanksgiving.”
This movie is just one of many disasters Hollywood has made trying to turn every single scenario into a horror or action film. We have had MULTIPLE Christmas action films that are all terrible.
There's that wedding movie where the bride and groom have to fight off terrorists in their tux and dress. There's also the horror film about being murdered on your birthday that got two installments.
Some situations don't need action movies. Or just movies at all. Thanksgiving is toeing that line.
There's also "Free Birds," which is just . . . meh. It's not very impressive in any way, the plot is equal to that of "Hot Tub Time Machine," and it just kind of misses the mark as a Thanksgiving movie.
However, they're not all bad. There are a few Thanksgiving movies worth their weight in cranberry sauce.
The first is "A Waltons Thanksgiving" which is a semi-reboot of an old TV show that takes place in the 1930s. You know I'm a sucker for period pieces.
The second is "Scent of a Woman" with Al Pacino. Not exactly one you should be watching with the whole family due to its R rating, but it primarily takes place during Thanksgiving break and is just an all-around solid movie.
Rounding out my recommendations is the Thanksgiving classic: "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." I mean, who didn't have their teacher wheel out the portable TV and throw this on the week before fall break? I wish that was a tradition that carried over to college.
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