We watched What's Cooking? just after 24: Season 2 and just before the movie in the post right below this. I think it was on our queue because of Dennis Haysbert.
I liked it, despite almost the entire film consisting of quick-cut scenes where it was unclear whether any plot or character development would take place.
The general plot is Thanksgiving dinner with four different Los Angeles families: One each black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Jewish (with lesbian daughter & de facto daughter-in-law).
This movie has a distinct spoiler -- the great thing about indie flicks is that spoilers don't get so widely spoiled (compare to the other movie in our current Netflix trio, "The Sixth Sense"...) -- and even though it's nothing Earth-shattering, suddenly I liked the movie a whole lot more than I previously had.
(By contrast Julia didn't like it at all. We've seen a few one-thumb-up, one-thumb-down movies in 2006.)
Oddly (given that I liked the movie and she didn't), I think large-group Thanksgiving dinners are profoundly overrated. There's just so much stress, and it's all so avoidable.
[And yet I think of myself as part of a relatively functional family, really not prone to stereotypical Thanksgiving dinner table outbursts.]
Freshman year of college, I took a midterm Wednesday morning then flew home for Thanksgiving. The rest of Wednesday was travel, all of Sunday was travel, all crowded airports and related nastiness, 1.8 travel days spent to enjoy three days in Tulsa. From that point on, with apologies to my parents, going home for Thanksgiving was just never worthwhile to me, and they accepted that.
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 13, 2006 10:24 PMHow I miss chanting "School on Monday! [clap, clap, clap-clap-clap]" at The Game every year.
(Every year Harvard and Yale play their annual football game the Saturday before Thanksgiving. By then Yale students are done for the holiday and Harvard students aren't.)
Posted by: Nate at December 13, 2006 10:56 PM