Thanksgiving Film Feast-ival 10.19.99

Apart from Thanksgiving being a holiday of showing appreciation, it’s also a feast day of bounteous portions, abundant cheer and ravenous gluttony. To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’ve assembled a collection of films about various kinds of feasts that may help aid digestion or just provide background stimulation to keep you from slipping into an L-Tryptophan coma.

Feast De Resistance

Babette’s Feast: An all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of Scandinavian talent, this sweet movie centers on two old ladies who get a second chance at finding love amid a delectable spread of treats.
Eat Drink Man Woman & The Wedding Banquet: The Ang Lee Collection -- two food-laden films about the struggle between Old and New World customs in Asian families.
Big Night: Mangia! Mangia! Mangia!
Soul Food: Every Sunday for 40 years, the Joseph family has come to Mama Joe’s house for a dinner of fried chicken, cornbread, collard greens, catfish, macaroni-and-cheese, biscuits and gravy, sweet potatoes and fresh-baked pie. When Mama gets sick, though, the family balance -- and the meal -- is threatened.
Tampopo: Truck driver, Gun teaches young widow Tampopo the keys to making the perfect noodle dishes in her Japanese noodle shop.
Like Water For Chocolate: Young Tita is forbidden by Mexican tradition to marry. When she falls for Pedro, her tears magically affect her cooking, striking all who eat it with a profound sadness. She soon discovers, to great comic effect, this is true with all her emotions.

The Third Deadliest Sin

The Meaning Of Life: Monty Python explains it all for you in this hilarious series of sketches including the tasteless bit with the world’s most voracious glutton and the infamous vomit-a-thon.
Un Bellisimo Novembre: The patriarch of a Sicilian family preaches self-control while gorging on himself on wanton sex and Italian cooking. Plus, Gina Lollabrigada! Meow.
Le Grande Bouffe: A French/Italian comedy about four affluent middle-aged men, bored with life, who decide to eat themselves to death. The French really know how to yuk it up.
Gluttony (Phillipe de Broca): The godless Frenchies explore hedonism once again with the anthology, Seven Deadly Sins with seven froggy auteurs tackling a respective sin. Gluttony is one of the best segments.
Six Wives Of Henry VIII: A six-part BBC mini-series about the heretical, libidinous English monarch, his six wives and his love affair with turkey drumsticks.

The Food Of The Gods

Alive: A Uruguayan rugby team enjoys fullback-sicles on the Andean slopes.
Delicatessen: The owner of an apartment complex in the post-apocalyptic future also runs a butcher shop that specializes in the choicest cuts of meat: his tenants!
Silence Of The Lambs: Dr. Hannibal Lechter takes his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Consuming Passions: A funny little film (from Monty Pythoners) about the executive of a chocolate factory who accidentally knocks three employees into a vat and produces a hit new chocolate treat.
Eating Raoul: A married couple preys on sexual deviants, luring them to their ghastly deaths, upon which their corpses are sold for dogfood. Except Raoul, who is reserved for dinner.

The Food Of The Gods II, Second Helpings.

Ravenous: Gold-rushing settlers, snowbound in a cave in the Sierra Nevada, are eaten by a Scotsman who steals their strength, spirit and essence and develops an insatiable appetite for human flesh.
C.H.U.D.: Cannibalistic Human Underground Dwellers emerge from the sewers of New York after several tons of toxic waste is dumped into them
Eaters Of The Dead: In 922 AD, Arab Ibn Fadlan visits Viking chieftain Buliwyf and discovers that our European ancestors didn’t bathe, sexed up anything and ate their cousins.
Night Of The Living Dead: Flesh-eating zombies descend upon a Pennsylvania farmhouse to satisfy their hunger for human brains.
Dead Alive: In Peter Jackson’s grotesque horror-comedy, a Rat Monkey transforms Mum into a rabid-fleshing eating zombie, seriously impeding son Lionel’s attempt to woo the lovely Paquita Maria Sanchez.