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Our thanks to the reader who forwarded this video and to all our readers!

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Poor Thanksgiving; it certainly doesn’t generate as much holiday ruckus in Hollywood as Halloween or Christmas do. While it may not be Tinseltown’s favorite holiday, there are still several television shows and films that center on Turkey Day.

As you prepare to fill up on stuffing, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, I’ve whipped up a short list of favorite Thanksgiving moments on screen.

10. “The Mouse and the Mayflower” – I watched this made-for-TV movie growing up, and it’s probably my all-time favorite Thanksgiving story. The score really sets it apart from the rest, with original songs “November” and “Mayflower,” which my family and I always associate with the holiday. Families will love it for the cutesy mice and the fun little story about how Thanksgiving came to be.

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9. “Pieces of April” - Before she was Mrs. Cruise, Katie Holmes starred as April, the family oddball who is stressed about preparing Thanksgiving dinner for her entire clan in her small apartment with a broken oven. If anything, it’s kind of a hoot to see Holmes dressed in punk clothes. (more…)

 YOUR GUIDE TO 88 THANKSGIVING MARATHONS AND SPECIALS

Why do people still watch television? I look at this list and all I see is the promise of endless commercials interrupted by the occasional non-commercial.

In the age of DVD and Streaming where you can program your own marathon, I wouldn’t even consider putting up with this. At best, I would DVR something so I could zip through the 13 minutes of ads found in every 30 minute program.

Today the entire “Wild Wild West” series arrives, all six seasons, and it cost me half what my cable bill used to be.

JEREMY RENNER UNVEILS KEY ‘BOURNE LEGACY’ DETAILS

I think Jeremy Renner is the best up and comer Hollywood has going right now. After “MI:4″ and this “Bourne” flick, my hope is that he breaks out as a genuine star.

Renner’s a very good actor, masculine, and has that indefinable star quality about him — intelligence and a sense of unpredictable danger. What makes a star a star is what they bring to a role without having to say a word, and Renner brings a lot.

BEST THANKSGIVING MOVIE OF ALL TIME IS….

Could not agree more.

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It’s a holiday and some might say we should be charitable to the unfortunate. By unfortunate usually they mean those that don’t have as much as you and I. But one might construe “unfortunate” to mean being gut wrenchingly stupid, too. And when one thinks of the gut wrenchingly stupid one often thinks of the denizens of Hollywood above all others. Still it is awfully hard to be charitable toward such stupidity, I have to admit.

Today I have two members of the gut wrenchingly stupid Hollywood set to report upon. It might have been three but the terminal lunacy of Charlie Sheen just goes without saying.

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This week Americans stood ready to wish each other a Happy Thanksgiving, to be sure. Well, everyone was but the  Angelina Jolie, that is. If reports are true, to her this holiday isn’t a day to thank God for our fortunate bounty and to reflect upon the fortuitous founding of this nation, it’s little else but “happy murder the natives day” and she refuses to take part.

Angelina Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” a friend of the actress tells me. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.

I suppose we can be charitable and ignore these kitschy musings based on a woefully incoherent view of American history. Unfortunately, it is just the sort of vapidity that is de rigueur for the empty headed Hollyweird set. As they puff themselves up imagining they care more than you about “the little people,” they indulge a corresponding hatred of our country all too often.

But Jolie’s absurd notion pales in comparison to the outright lunacy of “comedienne” Whoopi Goldberg (real name: Caryn Elaine Johnson). Whoopi thinks that the world does not have a Muslim problem, thinks “white men” are terrorists, and thinks that Muslims in the USA are persecuted more than Jews. Oh, there’s more. Goldberg also thinks that the Japanese didn’t attack Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Those are truly gut wrenchingly stupid notions. (more…)

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“You’re a little flat too…”  Brother, they don’t make ‘em like Crosby anymore.

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday.  Sure, Canada and a couple other nations have adopted their own weird versions of it too, but the notion of a nation setting aside a day to give thanks for its blessings could only arise in a nation that has been so abundantly blessed.  In its land, its people and its animating spirit, America has much to be thankful for even in a time of war, economic blight, and a government that too often seems to see its blessings as curses and its greatest strengths as flaws.

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But America’s abundance does not apply to movies about Thanksgiving.  Certainly some exist, but if you review a list of movies about Thanksgiving, the sad fact is that there are very few good ones.  Many are PC retellings of the original Thanksgiving story – one guess as to who the villains are (Hint:  It’s the dudes with buckles on their hats).  Others are tiresome melodramas about “quirky” families that reaffirm their bonds over plates of turkey, with “quirky” — meaning “annoying.”  (more…)

With only a day to go until Thanksgiving, Hollywood’s latest tale of post-catastrophe life ensures that audiences are truly thankful for what they have this year.

“The Road” is the dark post-apocalyptic journey of an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they travel from desolate, dangerous middle America toward the east coast. They hope to find remnants of civilized life there and to recreate what they lost in the mysterious unnamed cataclysm—probably a nuclear war—that left the world lifeless. Lifeless, that is, except for roving bands of cannibals and a few other pilgrims, like them, who search for some semblance of the past.

 The film is directed by John Hillcoat and adapted by Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. While not a classically scary film, I still sat on the edge of my seat for the entire 119 minutes. “Bad guys” rarely appear, but the knowledge that at any point cannibals could find the protagonists is disconcerting, and by the end of the film I was emotionally drained from the tense world in which the man and the boy live.

Much like McCarthy’s other work adapted for the screen, “No Country for Old Men,” a sense of hopelessness pervades this film. Early on, a roving band forces Mortensen to use one of his last two bullets—bullets presumably being saved for a desperate murder-suicide when hope finally runs out. From there, the run-ins with cannibals and a few other travelers never end happily. At best the encounters are bleak. Even at the end of “The Road,” hope for the future is tempered by the chilling terrors of the past, and the knowledge that further horrors await. (more…)

It’s that time of year again.  If you’ve got a leftist in your family, you can forget enjoying a familial celebration of the blessings bestowed upon you and your country.  If you’re white, you’re particularly guilty.  If you’re black like Zo, you’ll be referred to as nothing more than a “house negro” as seen in the YouTube comments section. The liberal Thanksgiving motto is as follows: Starve and be un-merry!

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