National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion

National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion

Family is really the centerpiece of all happenings that occur, especially on this special day known as Thanksgiving. I mean, apart from the wait to see the larger than life and American hero Santa Claus who is the icing on the cake on the Thanksgiving parade and the American traditional feast in the afternoon followed by the ravenous tidying of the house in the evening.

From the butt-kicking broadcasts of Eyewitness News in the embeds at the departure area of the airport as early as Wednesday right down to the macabre depiction of Roman bread and circuses where delirious women dressed in patchwork snowman sweat shirts mob Walmart at 5:30 hours in the morning to buy an 8.74 dollar DVD player, one day is all there is to simply lay around with those who matter while the chicken is in the oven.

It was last Thursday that I prepared a meal for 10 people, my friends, and my family, for whom I had a great time. They are all nuts for sure (myself included), but the good type of nuts. I’ve, however, come across a few instances of people who do have a strong disdain for their families, or simply do not have a liking for them. April Burns, for instance, in Peter Hedges’s Pieces of April (About a Boy).

What is particularly interesting about this one is that it sits nicely in a genre many will have come across I hate the family, and especially during the holidays Streetwise April and the rest of her straighter-laced family don’t actually interact at all in the film they don’t even celebrate together, all she does is prepar the dinner, then travels to it with her family who are equally annoyed at the day and wonder why they’ve gone through the trouble.

And that makes the film rather fascinating rather than relying on the more typical vicious depiction of family squabbles, digs and half-prearranged insults that characteristically accompany love hate relationships with family, it has plenty to say about the great big tangled ball of string that’s called ‘family’, minus all the drippy romance that is found in that concept.

In this instance, we have to say things that are not pleasing to the ears. Let’s start with stating that April seems to be the luckiest person when she is the most ungrateful one. Despite having the entire East Village tenement to back her up against the proverbial wall and complain about the thankless task of preparing Thanksgiving dinner, she chooses to sit back and relax (Residents of the East Village assisted her in various tasks related to Turkey Day).

Isn’t that blasphemous on so many levels? Katie Holmes (she of Phone Booth and who was forced to star in the deadpan Abandon because on the back of her impressive work in Batman her fan base was ravenous indeed) looked like a riot, her torn clothes with an eye-patch is the style joker was looking for, Legend.

But it was even better as she showed a remarkable versatility by delivering one of her best and most over the top performances where she masterfully and insultingly seemed to strive for our admiration while skillfully injecting just enough faltering from the character April into the performance. This would allow the audience to understand the sincerity behind, literally, the last attempt by a girl to make amends with her mother. If the apocryphal mother chooses to show up that is.

Let’s turn our attention to the better emotions that April dreamed of in relation to her mother, the ones that seemingly everyone never celebrates and its Thanksgiving. However, there are all the different pots in this building the genuine melting pot of the building that she lives in and lets her meet with all her neighbors. That explains why she desperately searches for help from Randoms on the street, meet the Bourgeois gentlemen who happens to be an exceptional Cook, elderly Chinese couple who don’t speak a word of English, and a gay gentleman with a canine buddy.

She seems to be taking a risk, almost like the Pilgrims. She sounds enthusiastic about it, which probably means she will have it out with her mother today or before it is too late.

The joy of Christmas is that there are less with horrid families add on Christmas cheer movies, when most yes most deserve to be discarded alongside the turkey carcass. There is also National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion, as bad and obnoxious a movie as could ever be made and still be suited for network television, this one was released on TBS last year. If one California family goes to visit their country relatives during Thanksgiving and all of them engage in cheap shows, how far can sheer dirt take them? It cannot.

It remains a bit of a mystery as to why “anesthesiologist to the stars” Mitch Snider (Judge Reinhold: Santa Clause 2) would recommend a visit to Redneck, Idaho unless he wanted to leave his horrible wife (Hallie Todd) there who was particularly interested in the question of who would do the cooking and cleaning if Thanksgiving was spent at their house (Mitch’s suggestion since the maid was off somewhere on Thanksgiving) rather amicable, actually.

Then they get into the SUV and drive to meet the long-lost cousin Woodrow (Bryan Cranston: Seeing Other People, Saving Private Ryan) and his wife, Pauline (Penelope Ann Miller). For fun, the Sniders bring along ‘Uncle’ Phil (Antony Holland) who is not an uncle to anyone, but does have a tendency to break wind a lot. This flatulence of the elderly will be used throughout this laughter free show, whenever there is a delay in the laughter, which also, seems to be the entire duration of this trifle.

The movie Martin Lawrence is in it, so it’s hard to remember the days when “National Lampoon” meant quality has some hysterics such as a chase scene with monster trucks, jokes from almost a decade ago and pretty much nothing to do with Thanksgiving. But it does pose the intriguing question: If someone were in a shower in the house of their dumb, obnoxious and probably crazy hick cousin, and then the cousin reaches into the shower and starts rubbing him all over, how long would it be before he realizes what is happening?

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