Turkey Day movies

The Onion’s AV Club offers up a list of “17 Memorable Thanksgiving Television Moments.”

It hits the highlights for me, including the Buffy episode with syphilitic Xander and pincushion Spike (“You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story”), and the funny and poignant “Shibboleth” episode of The West Wing (“Morton, I can’t pardon a turkey. If you think I can pardon a turkey, then you have got to go back to your school and insist that you be better prepared to go out in the world”).

And, of course, they include the all-time classic WKRP Thanksgiving episode — which, as God is my witness, ought to be replayed every year during the halftime of the Lions game.

It would’ve been a lot harder to come up with a list of 17 memorable Thanksgiving movies. My list is a bit shorter — 14 shorter, actually.

So here they are, my Three Memorable Thanksgiving Movies:

1. Duck Soup. Hail Freedonia I love this movie. “Three men and one woman are trapped in a building! Send help at once! If you can’t send help, send two more women!” What does it have to do with Thanksgiving? Nothing much, except that watching it results in Woody Allen’s life-affirming epiphany in Hannah and Her Sisters, which is a Thanksgiving movie. Hannah is a great movie, deserving all the Oscars it collected (for screenplay, and for actors Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest). But while it’s very funny in parts, it’s also maybe a bit heavy for an annual holiday movie-thon type tradition. So I’d go with Duck Soup instead.

2. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I kind of resent this film because it represents the end of John Hughes’ great run of teen movies. After the Ringwald Cycle and Ferris Bueller’s and Some Kind of Wonderful he switched gears to this kind of thing. Then Home Alone came out and Hughes never looked back. The change made Hughes a wealthy man, but left the world a poorer place. If you look past that, though, Planes is actually a pretty funny, and kind of sweet, movie.

3. Pieces of April. The post-Dawson, pre-Scientology Katie Holmes could actually act. Patricia Clarkson and Oliver Platt are both remarkable in this film, but the story is centered on Holmes and she comes through. I’m not usually a fan of dysfunctional-family-gathers-for-the-holidays movies, because they tend to be too aggressively “quirky.” These characters aren’t quirky, they’re human. Considering the scarcity of Thanksgiving movies and the multitude of cable channels, I’m amazed that somebody — TNT, Lifetime, AMC — hasn’t made airing this lovely little movie an annual ritual.

So that’s my list. What am I missing?

P.S.: If you’re in Philly and you don’t have to work the night before Thanksgiving (grumble, grumble), I recommend checking out Don McCloskey at the Grape Street Pub for the Fifth Annual Turkey Testicle Festival. (Note: I do not recommend the deep-fried, unpleasantly chewy, delicacies themselves.)