Thanksgiving, NACHO, EUROPA, AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

November 23rd, Thursday-Arg. I do this to myself every year and cook like crazy for Thanksgiving. It takes two days to really do it right without totally draining yourself, but even spreading out the work over two days takes a toll. I made Julia Child's Deconstructed Turkey with Turkey leg medallions stuffed with stuffing, Giblet Gravy, Cornbread Sausage Stuffing, Candied Yams, a Gluten-Free Pumpkin Pie, and Basil Green Beans. My neighbor Julie, brought Roasted Parsnips and Cranberry Sauce and made a Gluten-Free Apple/Rasberry Pie. Mo came by to keep us company as we got the dinner ready. We ate around 3p and I was stuffed after one helping. Kind of a letdown after all that work, after all I really want to eat a lot and frankly I just couldn't. I didn't even eat pie until a few hours later and then that was it for me.

Afterwards we watched NACHO LIBRE, which was only intermittently funny, but I kind of admire the effort. Jack Black is always interesting to watch, but there was a feeling of, "Oh, that's funny because they're so dumb." I don't mind movies like that if they also make me laugh, but here they didn't. We watched the outtakes which, to me anyway, seemed funnier than the movie because they just let Jack Black be Jack Black.

Then we watched EUROPA, EUROPA, which was fascinating. It's the story of a young Jewish boy who pretends to be a Hitler Youth in order to survive. This kid goes through a variety of tension riddled encounters with people who would love to kill him. The amazing thing is that he got away with it. At the end, he's told, "Don't bother telling anyone what happened to you. No one will believe it." I just remember that when I would watch the interviews for the Partisan videos that so many of them did similiar things (although not for such an extended period of time) and they mostly got away with it because they didn't look "Jewish" whatever that was supposed to mean. And it didn't hurt to be attractive either. One guy got away because he looked exactly like a German soldier's son, who had died. So weird that the Holocaust could have happened. I mean, rationally, genocide makes no sense at all. But I guess this was a time when people weren't thinking rationally, but letting their basest instincts take over. Hard to believe you could convince so many people that that was the best thing to do.

And then we saw ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, which was another movie that had no relationship to either movie we'd seen before. I don't know how to explain it, but it's about a series of relationships that a variety of people made in this unnamed neighborhood. A shoe salesman sells shoes to an elderly man, who's driver thinks of him romantically. The driver is also a video artist trying to get her work into a gallery curated by a woman who's got a problem with intimacy. The shoe salesman is dealing with getting a divorce and taking care of his two boys, one of whom gets involved with a possible online sexual predator. The other boy gets harrassed by some neighborhood girls but is drawn to another girl who's preparing her own dowry. There's more going on than what I just related but it's really about people trying to make a connection with each other. The child actors in the movie are fantastic, by the way. It's not a laugh riot, but it's a nice quiet movie, totally indie.