BEFORE: Thanksgiving Week is here, and sure, I could wait until Thursday to start all the films with people cooking big turkey dinners and (I'm guessing) serving up a side of family dysfunction as well, but I'm anxious to get to the end of the November chain, then take a week or two off and then start up that last chain that will get me to Christmas.
Katie Holmes carries over from "The Giver". Both she and Derek Luke were in "Alone Together" back in February, which is just another odd coincidence, unless I'm missing something.
THE PLOT: A wayward daughter invites her dying mother and the rest of her estranged family to her apartment for Thanksgiving dinner.
AFTER: Well, it's been many years since I've eaten Thanksgiving in Manhattan - come to think of it, it's possible that I've NEVER eaten Thanksgiving in Manhattan, despite living in NYC for 38 years now. Queens, sure, I think maybe two or three times. Long Island, Connecticut, and even upstate New York in Rockland County but I've probably never in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day. I can't think of a better day to NOT be in Manhattan, what with that damn Macy's parade and all - maybe New Year's Eve in Times Square is another definite no-no. What I'm perhaps most used to, however, is about getting OUT of town on Thanksgiving Day. For many years this meant going to my aunt and uncle's house, but my wife and I got tired of all the family drama there, and the annual screaming over the best way to prepare the holiday meal, so one year we went on a cruise and missed the family Thanksgiving, and we experienced the peace and beauty of a dinner provided by Holland America Cruise Lines, and then after that I never went back to my aunt and uncle's house.
This film details the reverse, though - a family in upstate New York that drives down on Thanksgiving morning to have dinner with the eldest daughter, who's apparently been at odds with her parents for several years after moving out, and now the family is seeking some kind of reconciliation, or at least a day of good will and bountiful food. It takes most of the movie for the family to get there, first they stop at Krispy Kreme for donuts (a smart move) and then after that they have to make frequent stops at rest areas because April's mother is very sick and needs to throw up a lot. She's dying from breast cancer, so there's some added pressure to have a good holiday meal, you know, because it might be her last, also this is perhaps the reason for attempting to reconcile.
Meanwhile, April tries to cook a Thanksgiving turkey dinner for the first time, and everything keeps going wrong. The oven in her tiny NYC apartment is broken, or perhaps the gas is off or perhaps the pilot light is out and she doesn't know how to light it. I had that problem in my first apartment in Brooklyn, it's a learning experience. But let's assume she's not stupid and her oven is indeed broken - she has to knock on her neighbor's doors in her building to try to find someone who can help her cook a turkey. The couple Eugene and Evette offer to help but only until the point they need to cook their own dinner, so that still leaves her about two hours short on the cooking time. But the rumor is that the guy on the fifth floor has a brand new oven, however he's a bit particular about who uses it and when, and eventually he feels that April hasn't properly thanked him, so he holds the turkey hostage for a while.
Also meanwhile, April's boyfriend Bobby is on a quest across town, to get a nice suit so he can look presentable when he meets April's parents. And his friend Latrell does hook him up, but on the way back downtown he gets called to meet a drug dealer named Tyrone, who used to be April's boyfriend and he's not jealous at all, he just wants to wish Bobby a Happy Thanksgiving while his goons rough him up. So naturally a beaten and bloody Bobby makes it back JUST as April's family arrives, and this scares them off. Right, they leave because Bobby was all beat up, not because he was black, because that would be racist, even for a film made 20 years ago.
So April's quest to make a great holiday dinner for her family would seem to be a bust - her family drove all the way down to her apartment from upstate, and then chose to drive off before ringing her bell. Well, who's to say that wasn't the right call? Hey, if you don't feel comfortable in New York City, you're free to leave at any time, in fact we kind of would prefer that you do, rather than stick around and talk about how unsafe you feel. So maybe not much has changed here since 2003 after all. April, of course, is heartbroken, she dealt with three sets of diverse neighbors to get the turkey cooked - the African American couple Eugene and Evette, the gay guy on the fifth floor who held her turkey hostage, and the Chinese-American family who finished cooking the turkey and also fixed its deformity with dough, somehow.
I've never had this exact situation happen to me, but last year when we visited my parents for Thanksgiving, I pre-ordered the "turkey dinner in a box" from the local grocery store, it came with everything we needed - a 2 lb. turkey breast, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, rolls, and cranberry sauce. (I just needed to add on green bean casserole and a CAN of jellied cranberry sauce, because my family doesn't like the natural stuff where you can see the berries, we prefer the jellied stuff that retains the shape of the can, it's important.). Anyway, the plan was to just heat everything up in our hotel suite's microwave and then drive it over to my parents, as we did during the pandemic - only we got the only suite at the hotel with a microwave that didn't work. So, a quick conversation with the front desk, and they loaned me the other microwave that gets used during the hotel's daily breakfast service, and I just had to promise to return it before 7 am the next morning. Yeah, we got my parents their turkey dinner.
I should point out that I am capable of cooking a whole turkey dinner from scratch - my mother taught me over the course of 10 years. Christmas dinner, really, but her Christmas dinner was always a turkey, same elements as the Thanksgiving meal. I learned all her secrets by helping her, and those last few pre-pandemic years, I would say I did 99% of the cooking chores while she supervised. So I CAN do it, but the last two years it was easier and faster to just buy the "dinner in a box" and heat it up. But this leads me to my biggest NITPICK POINT tonight, namely that April didn't ease into the process, she didn't do a practice turkey or test out the mashed potato recipe or figure out the best way to cook brussels sprouts, she just memorized a bunch of her mother's recipes and went for it. God help her, but this is just not the proper way to do things, this would be a recipe for disaster. Practice, practice, practice, that's the only way to really nail Thanksgiving if you're going to cook everything from scratch. Again, it took me 10 years to get it down, and now that I haven't done it in a while, it would be tough, but I think I could do it. (Basting technique is very important, and being strong enough to lift that 18-pound turkey out of the oven many times on the big day kind of meant the job fell to me - plus my sister had two kids to wrangle, being childless meant I could devote all of my Thanksgiving morning to the proper attention needed for a well-cooked turkey and all those side dishes.)
Anyway, April's family regroups at a diner somewhere outside of NYC (looks like Long Island, but could easily be in New Jersey somewhere...) and I also approve this message, I've had great Thanksgiving dinners at diners, too - you don't HAVE to get turkey if the place also offers prime rib, just saying. And who's to say you can't celebrate Thanksgiving with a hot turkey sandwich, or even a pastrami reuben? It's up to you - the NYC area diners are food wonderlands with gigantic menus. Get some cream of turkey soup if you need to celebrate the holiday in some small fashion. But April's mother eventually feels bad about ditching April's Thanksgiving feast, so she and her son Timmy hitch a ride back with some bikers. Eventually the rest of the family also turns up at April's tiny apartment, and the holiday is saved. But how did the rest of the family know Mom and Timmy were headed back to April's? Nobody in this film seems to have a cell phone - well, it was 2003, they may not have had smart phones yet but they might have had those old flip phones.
BUT, here comes NITPICK POINT #2, we know that April has a tiny NYC apartment - there are four apartments on each floor, and it's a small building on Suffolk St. So how the hell did they fit April, Bobby, five members of April's family, the Chinese-Americans AND two bikers into that small railroad apartment? That's impossible, or some kind of Thanksgiving miracle.
Speaking of small, this film had a tiny production budget, just $300,000 (in 2003 money, that is) and that's not a lot, no matter how you slice it. It's got an "Indie" feel for sure, and the stars probably had to sign a waiver that acknowledged they weren't going to make union scale, and that they believed in the project enough that they were willing to waive the SAG minimum daily rate and work for less money upfront. This was called the SAG low-budget agreement, and I produced a film around the same time that qualified - I believe it was the only animated feature to ever qualify as "low-budget" according to SAG rules. I remember I had to have every union actor in the film sign a similar waiver, and then we paid them each $500 or $1,000 anyway, which was more than we were obligated to. "Pieces of April" went on to play at the 2003 Sundance Festival, and then it made over $3.2 million, not bad for a film with a budget of $300,000. And Patricia Clarkson got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
OK, so we've learned that cooking a Thanksgiving turkey dinner is very difficult, that NYC is a large city full of diverse and very helpful people, and that you should put effort into the holiday if if there's a chance that you can reconcile with your family over a nice meal. Really, I should call it there, because that really seems like all there is to learn BUT I have two more films set at Thanksgiving to watch, and three more films total this week (one is honestly just filler to connect the others...).
Wait, I just realized NITPICK POINT #3 - Thanksgiving is simply one of the biggest travel days of the entire year, but this family driving INTO New York City never encounters one bit of traffic. How is that possible? Remember that damn Macy's parade, and the thousands of people who drive in to the city that morning to see it? But they get RIGHT on the bridge, no problems apparently, and then somehow also drive ALL THE WAY down to the lower East Side and still don't encounter any traffic at all. This is simply impossible, except for in a movie, I guess. Sure, we've driven upstate or out to Long Island on Thanksgiving morning, but then sat in traffic for HOURS on the way home.
Also starring Derek Luke (last seen in "Alone Together"), Oliver Platt (last seen in "Gun Shy"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "De Palma"), Alison Pill (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), John Gallagher Jr. (last seen in "Underwater"), Alice Drummond (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Sean Hayes (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Cocaine Bear"), Lillias White, Leila Danette, Adrian Martinez (last seen in "The Guilty"), Sisqo (last seen in "Get Over It"), Armando Riesco (last seen in "25th Hour"), Vitali Baganov (last seen in "Salt"), Susan Bruce (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Stephen Chen (last seen in "Vampire's Kiss"), Sally Leung Bayer (last seen in "The Pink Panther"), Jack Chen, Jacqueline Dai, Rosa Luo.
RATING: 5 out of 10 types of salad dressing at the diner
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