What's Cooking? (2000) watch online HD

With Girlfight, this tops my best of 2000 list. Not that I have seen them all, and not that there's much competition. This was such a dreadful year in Hollywood I'm swearing off Oscar day. But this IS an amazing film (as is Girlfight). Let women direct more, I say, and let budgets be slashed in subatomic particles. Most importantly, let people who have stuff to say, say it. All the other ones should wait for inspiration.

One of the amazing things about this film is its pace. It is breathless, and you never quite stop laughing or gasping or having some variety of intense edge-of-your-seat emotional reaction. Which is amazing, because the plot is so complex, it could easily have gotten lost in chaos. Even as you laugh, the tension doesn't let up. The stories unfold rapidly and dramatically and with full comic timing, and you never quite stop marveling. We are not treated very often to this kind of inventive filmmaking.

If you've lived in LA for any significant length of time, you'll realize from the start that this film is not meant to be realistic. The MTA scenes at the beginning are so un-LA, so colorful and happy, you know this is going to be a grand fest of the imagination and the heart, not a tale of urban life. (For one, people on MTA buses tend to sit dejectedly, not to have a collective laugh&lovefest). Similarly, the ethnic angle is more life-as-we-would-like-it-to-be than life-as-is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's so refreshing to see race on film without having to trudge through misery, pain, and blood, you want to weep with gratitude. What's Cooking? is full of big themes treated with similar lightness: broken families, same-sex relationships, tradition vs. progress, parenthood, urban violence, gender roles, politics... Even as it packs it all in, the film does it all seamlessly, treating it as the stuff of everyday's life it in fact is (funny how movies tend to deal with one issue at the time, and how we've grown to consider that a good thing).

But lightness is not glibness or superficiality. There's a big heart and a big sharp mind at the center of What's Cooking? and problems get taken seriously. Clearly, since this is the world as we'd like it to be, most things find some sort of satisfactory conclusion by the end. And that is more than all right, because we're tired to see gays and people of color go down, families drown in waters to thick to negotiate, and all the vast repertoire of disasters that make critics think a film "got it right." Nope. Not here. But the world as we'd like it to be can still be a POSSIBLE world, and this is ultimately the exhilarating nutshell of What's Cooking?: that joy is not beyond our reach, the pain can give way to healing, and that, hell, we can, maybe not perfectly but nonetheless, all get along.

Well done!

With the exception of A WALK ON THE MOON starring Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, this film is easily my favorite indie film. I first saw it four years ago when my sister was home from San Diego state for Easter vacation and we rented the DVD the following day from Blockbuster. Some of the most talented names in film (Oscar-nominee Alfre Woodard, Oscar-winner Mercedes Rheul, Lainie Kazan and Joan Chen) and up-and-coming talent (Dennis Haysbert of FAR FROM HEAVEN and the ALLSTATE commercials) star in this terrific ensemble film with a brilliant script and first-rate performances most notably from Woodard, Rheul and Kyra Segewick.

The story (set throughout the Fairfax district of L.A.) revolves around four different families (focusing primarily on the women of each) all of four different ethnicities: one African-American, one Hispanic, one Jewish and one Vietnamese and the family conflicts they deal with over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Woodard's family is dealing with a marriage that is on the brink of a divorce with two subplots of an extremely irritating mother-in-law (Ann Weldon) and a troubled son in his early twenties; Rheul's family is confronting the fact that she has separated from her husband (Victor Rivers) and has moved on with her life and has a promising relationship with her boyfriend (A Martinez) despite what her son wants. Kazan's family is up in arms with her daughter (Segewick) involved in a lesbian relationship with her recently married life-partner (Julianna Margulies). Chen's family is most definitely the most dysfunctional while their daughter is involved in a relationship with a young white boy, their eldest son uses his midterms schedule as a false pretense to avoid coming home for the holidays and is seeing Rhuel's daughter and Chen's teenage son has been suspended from school for stealing a test while also being dangerously involved with a gang. One highlight of the films is where Woodard's friends come over to her house for Thanksgiving dinner and their rebellious, uptight teenage daughter wants nothing to do with any of them. When confronted by Woodard's mother-in-law about what she and Woodard's little daughter and her friend are doing, she states that "we're playing Thanksgiving... she's the mommy, she's the daddy and I'm the alcoholic, cult-worshiping, Satanic stepmother!"

The story moves in a very transitional pattern alternating between the four families with very interesting scenarios for each. Gurinder Chadha (director of BEND IT LIKE BEKHAM and the upcoming BRIDE AND PREJUDICE) has really outdone herself with the unique and oft-times exasperating ties that bring these families together. Another engaging aesthetic in this film (possibly the most important) is the incredibly diverse variety of delicious food each family cooks throughout the midsection of the film in preparation for the holiday tradition. You can almost smell the enticing scents of the apple and pumpkin pies and the turkey and mashed potatoes as well as the Asian and Hispanic dishes. The special features on the DVD of the films offers six different recipes as they were used in the actual film.

This is one film that my whole family and I love to watch every year on Thanksgiving and one we watch throughout the year as well. Go rent it sometime this weekend and see what you think. I really think you'll love it!

Funny, charming, sad, and completely entertaining throughout.... a very talented ensemble cast...some surprises in the story. This is, I think, a holiday classic. I look forward to seeing it again and again.

This movie is a comedy about the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. It follows four families (black, Latino, Jewish, and Vietnamese) during their holiday celebrations, with all the messes that crop up during big family gatherings. Each of the families has its own problems, which are to some extent intertwined.

An example of one of the family messes: A young man in the Latino family bumps into his father (who had moved out some time earlier) at the grocery store, and invites him to Thanksgiving dinner. His mother is furious, because she doesn't want anything to do with her estranged husband, particularly during a big holiday event.

The acting and directing are very good, but the writing and editing are really wonderful. The cast is huge, but the editing manages to make it easy for the audience to keep track of everyone. It's full of laughs (and some light drama), but aside from some stereotyping, mostly realistic. Even though there are quite a number of name actors, the screen time is divided among the cast to fit the story, not to fit the actors' egos -- an impressive balancing act for the director and producers.

The food scenes, aside from a few kitchen disasters, were enough to inspire quite an appetite. It's a good thing the Seattle International Film Festival scheduled the screening in the afternoon, so I could have dinner right after the movie.

This is one of the best recent comedies I've seen.

WHAT'S COOKING? (2000) ***1/2 Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick, Julianna Marguilies, Dennis Haysbert, Maury Chaykin, Lainie Kazan, Victor Rivers, Douglas Spain, A Martinez, Francois Chau, Will Yun Lee, Estelle Harris, Ralph Manza. Wonderful sleeper depicting four Los Angeles melting pot families all celebrating Thanksgiving, cross cutting between homes sharing the universal theme of family, love and ultimately acceptance of one another. Funny, emotional, intelligent and superbly acted with an equally impressive script by Gurinder Chadha (who directed) and Paul Mayeda Berges her real-life companion. Stand out performances especially by Ruehl, Chen & Woodard as strong-willed matriarchs and Sedgwick and Marguilies as one of the sexiest onscreen lesbian couples in some time. Kudos to the off-screen cooks who whip up some truly mouth-watering displays in uniquely different yet delicious dinners for the quartet broods.

Holidays are a time for families to come together. More often than not, these little "reunions" manage to bring out the worst in people and unpleasant episodes from the past get dredged up and brutally dissected for the thousandth time. Or your parents may take turns pushing your buttons (which of course they programmed in the first place) and endlessly aggravating you with a never-ending barrage of life questions. "When are you getting married?" "When are we getting grandchildren?" "What do you intend to do with your life?" Small wonder that the suicide rate increases exponentially around these times of joy.

Rather than limit herself to one family's deluge of dysfunctional dialogue at Thanksgiving, writer/director Gurminder Chadha, zooms in on a multi-family multicultural view of the holiday. We are introduced to the Jewish family with the lesbian daughter and her lover, the Hispanic family with the philandering husband and newly liberated wife, the cross-generational Vietnamese family's struggle with old traditions vs. new realities, and the successful yet fractured African American family. Happy holidays!

Unlike "The Big Night" where food is intended to inspire pure sensory decadence, or "Like Water for Chocolate" in which it takes on a mystical, magical quality, Chadha's uses food to illuminate the contrasts between the families in the piece. While turkey is served as the main course at every dinner table, it is prepared, cooked and presented very differently by each family. The roasted polenta, fajitas, spring rolls and homemade macaroni and cheese that supplant the side dishes typically associated with Thanksgiving - corn, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes - further enhance the feeling (and reminded me that I had missed dinner). But movies do not live by food alone.

What sets this film apart from its contemporaries is not its parallel, intertwining plots, or the setting, but its execution. Any of the plots could easily provide enough fodder for a full-length movie, which makes their skillful amalgamation in 106 minutes that much more impressive. This is more remarkable when one takes into account that no one in the voluminous (there are dozens of speaking parts) and talented ensemble cast is there as window dressing - every character is solid and has a clearly defined purpose. Rarer still is the fact that the lion's share of screen time is devoted to the development of strong female characters, which might explain what drew Mercedes Ruehl, Julianna Marguelies and Joan Chen to the project. My praise has not yet ended.

The dialogue is realistic and well written, and the situations, though sometimes tongue-in-cheek, familiar and believable. The pacing is quick, slowing down to take a breather only when the audience needs it, but never leaves the viewer behind. The editing is tight and clean, rarely allowing any one scene to run too long. Finally, the cinematographer deserves congratulations for the exceptionally sumptuous food shots, I swear I could smell the turkey. In movies, as in life however, nothing is perfect.

The movie does lapse into stereotypes in several instances, for example, could anyone be as truly annoying and clueless as the character of Aunt Bea (played to wonderful excess by Estelle Harris)? I hope not. The film also goes to the sentimentality well a little too often and the ending, while clever, is contrived. While noticeable, these flaws are merely mildly distracting, and do not overwhelm the film.

As the saying goes, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, it was an experience. * Make reservations to catch this delectable dish as soon as it's served up at your local theater.

*I didn't actually cry, I just got a little something in my eye.

"What's Cooking" is one of the most non-dogmatic feminist movies I've seen (as compared to say "24 Hour Woman") as exemplified by a climactic scene of one mother stuffing her face with two pieces of homemade pie amidst crisis while declaring "I'm weak? Is it weak to want to hold the family together?"

So many holiday or family gathering movies (like "Avalon" and "Hannah and her Sisters" and "Eat Drink Man Woman") have been made by men and they always felt off balance to me compared to my observations and experiences. Here the women in the kitchen are symbolically and functionally at the center of the meal preparation, the meal and the families.

Other women directors have been successful at portraying a single ethnic group's family issues, such as "Double Happiness" or Nancy Savoca's "True Love." But this is a multi-ethnic All-Americans Thanksiving in L.A. (reminding me of the children's book "Molly's Pilgrim") an L.A. where people from different traditions (Vietnamese, Chicano, African-American and Jewish) all integrate the trappings of the Pilgrims into that basic of ethnic identity--food-- to intersect in unexpected ways, at work, in the community, in their homes and in their hearts.

It's an impressive cast of actresses in particular; it's noteworthy that such a stellar cast would do a small indie -- clearly they jump at the chance to get "meaty" roles for women.

The audience laughed, and cried, and gasped. While your popcorn will pale beside the feasts before your eyes, be sure to eat something during the movie cause you'll be real hungry afterwards!

(originally written 11/19/2000)

We've had AMERICAN PIE, AMERICAN BEAUTY, and AMERICAN PSYCHO. This is AMERICAN STEW.

The film is entertaining as it mixes drama and comedy into an interesting recipe. To use other metaphors, the film is the American tossed salad or mixing bowl. We see four quite different families experiencing Thanksgiving day in seemingly different ways. But underneath, we see also the similarities of the joys, pains, and struggles as the various families deal with the reality hidden beneath the holiday veneer.

As the family members connect with and disconnect from each other and with members of the other families, the surface is pulled away, and we see what is really underneath the pleasantries and polite facades. This is a very accurate depiction of the sadness and humor that surround family holidays, and the film might be a good thing to watch just before or during such holidays. We see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the movie and can learn that holidays can be hilarious pains.

"What's Cooking?" is one of the most overlooked films in history! The powerhouse actors portraying gentle characters were magnificent. The way the stories perfectly combined shocked me, and the movie kept me very intrigued and put a smile on my face all way through. In LA, on Thanksgiving day, four multi-cultural families deal with their dysfunctional relatives.

In the Avila family, a Hispanic-American clan, Elizabeth's (Mercedes Ruehl) son, Anthony (Douglas Spain), invites his estranged father Javier (Victor Rivers) to dinner. Meanwhile, her daughter Gina (Isidra Vega) has invited her boyfriend Jimmy (Will Yun Lee), who is Chinese.

In the Nguyen family, an Asian-American clan, Trinh (Joan Chen) is always in a battle with her daughter Jenny (Kristy Wu), who has found a gun under the bed of her brother's (Brennan Louie) bed.

In the Williams family, an African-American clan, Audrey's (Alfre Woodard) **SPOILER** husband Ronald (Dennis Haysbert) was having an affair at work. Meanwhile, their estranged son Michael (Eric George) has quit college and come home for Thanksgiving, to celebrate with Grandma Williams (Ann Weldon) and the Moore family (Shareen Mitchell, Gregory Itzin, Mariam Parris).

In the Seelig family, a Jewish-American clan, Rachel's (Kyra Sedgwick) parents (Lainie Kazan, Maury Chaykin) can't deal with her being a lesbian with Carla (Julianna Margulies), and must hide the secret from Aunt Bea and Uncle David (Estelle Harris, Ralph Manza).

I must begin by saying all of the principle actors, except Kristy Wu and Julianna Margulies, did an amazing job.

Mercedes Ruehl gave a stunning performance as Elizabeth, a woman who couldn't go back to her cheating husband. Douglas Spain and Isidra Vega did excellent work in their supporting roles, while Will Yun Lee brought smiles to your face all the time.

Joan Chen was magnificently wonderful as a Vietnamese woman who wants to stick to her Asian customs. Kristy Wu is a terrible actress, but her acting doesn't rain on this parade of a movie. Brennan Louie had a truly minor role, so there's not much I can say about him.

Alfre Woodard was so damn amazing that I was about to lose my mind, she was really good. Dennis Haysbert was nothing out of the ordinary, but decent. Eric George had a very minor role also, but he did good. Ann Weldon was very entertaining and I would have loved to see more of her. Gregory Itzin and Mariam Parris had small roles, but Shareen Mitchell, in the small amount of time she was on, was jaw-dropping amazing and a huge scene stealer!

Kyra Sedgwick is a great actress and she really pulls this role off. Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaykin are absolutely flawless—there's no way you can't love them. Julianna Margulies did a horrible job. She was obnoxious, stupid, and one-dimensional. Estelle Harris and Ralph Manza had small roles, but they acted them out hilariously.

I must say the writers of the film handled each family very well, never giving the audience too much of one. Thanksgiving is a difficult time and just because it's Thanksgiving now—not everything is all happy and peachy. The film portrayed that message greatly.

The most intriguing family was the Williams one. It had very well-put together plot lines and it was delightful to watch the actors, because they all did wonderful. They were the sort of 'perfect' family that had it's problems revealed piece by piece.

The next most intriguing family was the Seelig one. Kyra Sedgwick was the glue of it and everyone, except Julianna Margulies like said before, turned in really good performances. The lesbian issue is handled very well and there are some gentle scenes of joy.

The third most intriguing family out of the four was the Avila one. Mercedes Ruehl left a huge impression in her role and so did every single person that had anything to do with the Avila plot. The story-line is interesting, although at times there are senseless scenes.

The least intriguing family is the Nguyen one. It's the least intriguing, but still very intriguing. Joan Chen's performance raises it to a solid 8 on my list and the supporting cast, besides the intolerable Kristy Wu, did great. The stories were a bit dramatized, but it was still good.

ALL IN ALL: "What's Cooking?" is my favorite movie of 2000 and if there's only one movie you can see from that year…make it this one! It's Flawless! 10 Thumbs Up (Out Of 10)

"What's Cooking" is yet another film which shows a short period of time in the lives of multiple disconnected characters who have something in common. In "Magnolia" the common denominator was proximity. In "All the Rage" it was guns. In "The Five Senses" is was senses. Etc. Etc. Etc. In "What's Cooking" it's food....Thanksgiving Day dinner.

"What's Cooking" has superb casting, direction, script/screenplay, etc. However it has one huge problem which it shares with other films of this ilk: Too many characters and too little time with which to develop them sufficient to create that all important bond with the audience. The result is a herky-jerky story flow and a disconnected audience which is reduced to pure voyeurism. Too busy and too superficial.

After watching this movie on a boring Saturday afternoon, I couldn't quite figure out why so many people liked it. It wasn't "heartwarming" or "clever"; it was merely an amalgam of every other "mismatched people coming together during a holiday and despite their ideological differences learning something about each other" movie ever made.

The characters are a stereotype bouillabaisse -- We have the Blacks, the Hispanics, The Jews, The Asians, and the Homosexuals -- and they never do anything except what everyone expects characters in a movie like this to do. The black mother declares that it's "all right, then" when it's mentioned that another black character is at church instead of helping prepare dinner (because all blacks love church), the Hispanics seem only capable of speaking Spanish when the greet each other or make exclamations, the lesbians do nothing but cuddle and kiss (and one of them wears a bandanna. Because all lesbians dress like Ani DiFranco), and the Vietnamese family owns a video store. In L.A. Imagine that.

Oh, and the movie is called "What's Cooking" because each ethnic family cooks a different version of what they think Thanksgiving dinner should be! The Black mother wants cornbread and macaroni and cheese, the Hispanics are shown rolling tortillas, the Vietnamese family is deep frying spring rolls; I'm surprised there wasn't a bottle of Manischewitz on the Jewish table. This is all shown via the time-honored tradition of the "musical-montage", where they play the Surfari's "Wipeout", rapidly switching the instruments used in the melody to reflect the respective cultures. Isn't that cute? Anyway, once the director is finished establishing how different everyone is, he attempts to show the inner humanity that we, as all people of every race, religion and culture share, by inventing implausible and overly dramatic conflicts for each of the families to deal with. It would be a plot-killer to mention what each of these conflicts are, but rest assured that they are indeed surprises, that is if you have been sleeping for the first half of the movie. The theme of "disgracing the family" runs pretty strong throughout.

All in all, if you're the type of person who enjoys those new-fangled movies that revolve around the stories of unlikely characters intertwining, well, you still won't like this movie. If you like extended montages of food being passed around a table, then you need to put this in your Netflix queue. But if stereotypes and clichés are endearing to you, then make sure you ask for this for Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or Kwanzaa.

What a grand idea - to celebrate America and also to highlight cultural diversity, let's have an African-American, Hispanic, Jewish, and Vietnamese family all meet at Thanksgiving with their own turkey feast. "What's Cooking" starts out as a meaningful discourse on our ethnic differences but ends up as a superficial, patronizing mess. Using food as a focal point, "What's Cooking" could have reveal much about the importance of family to these four cultures. Instead, we are treated to silly plots (do you really believe all four families lived in the same block) and four equally sanitized endings to some very difficult contemporary problems - acculturation, same-sex relationships, infidelity, and racial prejudice. The filmmakers also casted big name stars in misplaced roles to gain commercial success at the risk of losing its credibility - Joan Chen as Vietnamese, Mercedes Ruehl as Hispanic, and Kyra Sedgwick and Julianna Margulies as a lesbian couple. You think back on "Babette's Feast", "Like Water for Chocolate", and "The Big Night" and you feel connected to food as an overpowering statement on human passion and compassion. In "What's Cooking", food is treated no better than the commercial that adorns the city bus. Fittingly the film takes places in Los Angeles where people there could stomach this Pablum as real food. Fortunately, for the rest of us, we can spot a fake even if it looks like an old-fashioned turkey.

Incredible how they got the issues around Asian-American right, and African-American right, and Jewish-American right. Very, very perceptive and well done! The Asian American issues with the girl and the mother are very well done and so true to life. Same with the problems with the African American father and his son--and his mother. the Latin-American wife-husband-boyfriend problem was exceptional. So many things about the Jewish American were absolutely true. and mixing up the gay-lesbian thing with the Jewish family was perfect. it was a bit unrealistic that even in l.a. all these people live within hearing distance of each other, and that was the only contrived element of the movie. Wasn't there some other way around that?

Really wonderful movie about families and communities from different cultures and backgrounds gathering for Thanksgiving dinner. I thought that each of their stories were very interesting and showed how much each family could be dysfunctional in their own way. Would definitely recommend!

It's Thanksgiving and in the LA area of Fairfax four households come together in a mix of family and friends, each with their fair share of troubles and strife just below the surface. For the Nguyen's part, the parents try to keep the traditions of the grandparents while worrying about the acculturation of their children. In the Avila household tensions arise when one of Isabel's children invite her estranged husband to the same meal that she plans to unveil her new boyfriend. The Williams family have Audrey trying to keep a whole raft of secrets from her visiting mother-in-law. At the final house, an elderly Jewish couple struggle to come to terms with their daughter's lesbian partner while also hiding it from their visiting sister and brother-in-law. As the turkeys finish cooking, things come to a boil at each of the meals, resulting in tears, hurt, fights, revelations and some healing.

This is a rather ambitious story that doesn't quite manage to rise above the level of melodramatic soap opera but still produces an enjoyable and busy film. The film focuses on four family dramas – each of which could have been a film in there own right with good writing. The decision to make this an ensemble piece with no one story dominating the running time means that the film is never dull but also reduces the penetration we make into the characters and lives in each case. This reduces the emotional involvement we can possibly feel because the stories are fairly superficial and the characters are tick boxes rather than coming across as convincing people, and their problems are fairly simple and not as deep and involving as they could have been. However, even if this leaves it as a more professional daytime TV sort of movie, it does manage to avoid the syrup sentimentality of those sorts of movies and is the better for it. The collection of stories may well mean that I never was moved that much by any one of them, but it did make the film easy to get into and kept it moving and busy.

The cast really helps as well; none of them really has the material to shine but they are part of making it feel professional (as opposed to the overwrought delivery so common in tvm's). Woodward, Haysbert, Chen, Margulies, Sedgwick, Ruehl, Harris etc, all give solid performances and help make up for the deficiencies in detail in the material. The way they all work together within their specific stories is important to and I felt that they all did well with what they were given even if the material wasn't there to allow any of them to really deliver anything approaching a barn-storming performance.

Overall this is a film that it is easy to pick holes in because it doesn't really excel as an emotional story because it has so much to cover but it does do each story well enough to keep the film moving, engaging and enjoyable. Nothing earth shattering then, but a warm story with enough going for it to make for a good film with solid delivery all round from the talented and unshowy cast.

Well, I liked it. Replete with familial tension and tenderness, humor, surprise and suspense, this flick is a feast. Four families struggle to get the big meal on the table and keep from killing each other before they can get through it. This film is a unsung gem, written and acted every bit as well as American Beauty and interweaving stories on par with Magnolia. The characters are my own family, my neighbors, and people I believe I might know. No performance feels overly contrived and the dialog sings with authenticity. Some may feel the story loping along a bit slowly, but I enjoyed every moment, every frame shot through the rooftops of these four only reasonably dysfunctional households. Yes, the gun thing scared the hell out of me, I held my breath until they showed me how it turned out.

I particularly enjoyed this movie although I felt the audience was forced to endure the politically correct themes of the day. I was beginning to wonder how many dysfunctional acts could be shown in one movie. The acting was superb with Mercedes Ruehl taking top honors. The lesbian couple was one of the acts of pandering and could have been more realistically replaced by something more pertinent to a Jewish family. As the movie progressed I was able to look past the blatant pandering and look at what I thought was the basis of the plot. It never occurred to me that this was an attempt to show the multicultural diversity in one city or our country. Instead, I thought it was a good look at human nature in general, regardless of culture. Somewhere between Martha Stewart and Norman Rockwell we have developed an idea of what the perfect Thanksgiving and Christmas should be. We take this perception and then create it in accordance to our own specific culture. We think that certain foods are required and everyone will get along. As we all know the perfect Thanksgiving is only an idealistic goal very seldom achieved. Thirty minutes into the movie I was depressed because I have been through similar holidays. Maybe not with the same circumstances but nonetheless marred by burnt food, family arguments, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed this and would recommend any newlywed couple planning to host a holiday dinner for their combined families to watch. What I basically got from this movie was a reinforcement of real life holidays, relax, do what you can to make it a success, but most importantly, enjoy the fellowship of the family without the drive for perfection

Experience Thanksgiving with four different families (Jewish, Vietnamese, Hispanic, African American) in a Los Angeles neighborhood. It has a lot of the typical holiday family issues and few not so typical. I think basically it's showing that even though the cultures are very different, the way people react to the holidays is pretty universal. It has a nice blend of humor mixed with the stress of holiday and makes for enjoyable feast. As a side note, it has a reference to my alma mater, UCSB...which, to set the record straight, does not have a business school.

*** (out of 4)

This movie focuses on how four families of different ethnicities and deal with Thanksgiving. The Jewish family is dealing with a Lesbian daughter. The Vietnamese family is dealing with their teenage daughter's hormones, their younger son's school troubles, their oldest son's sense of family, and their youngest son's pure stupidity (although this kid's sub-20 IQ is not acknowledged, it's a vital component of the tension at the end) The Hispanic family is dealing with a cheating father, and the African American family is dealing with marital and father-son issues. All these problems are studied in depth with a sympathetic eye.

With the exception of the two Asian teens (Kristy Wu and Jimmy Phan), the acting is really good. These two seem to think thrashing about aimlessly is a substitute for emotion. While there are some stupid characters in the movie (e.g., Anthony Avila who sides with his cheating dad), their motivations are generally logical and well-developed. Mrs. Avila (Mercedes Ruehl) is especially impressive in her strength, emotion, and empathy.

On a side note, I don't know if you've seen immigrant families, but the parents generally don't have time to work out 5 hours a day to look as good as they do in this movie. They're too busy running video stores and such. This and the barely-noticeable accents of the Vietnamese grandparents, are glaring distractions in a movie that tries to show the reality of multicultural life in LA.

The movie wraps up in that annoying typical Hollywood ending with the bad guys suddenly realizing the errors of their ways and making amends with the people they've wronged. If a big-budget movie ended like this all the critics would be up in arms about it being a pandering feel good piece of Hollywood drivel. As it stands, we let a lot of independent movies get away with Hollywood endings (see Bend it Like Beckham, for example).

I just saw this movie for the first time at the Roger Ebert Fifth Annual Overlooked Film Festival at the historic 1,500 seat Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Illinois.

What a delightful and unexpected movie story!

The story highlights the lives of four families who are celebrating their version of a traditional Thanksgiving.

This is unlike no other Thanksgiving movie you have ever seen. Almost 1,500 theatre goers laughed and were awed by this performance.

You have to see it to believe it. The story is full of surprises -- some pleasant and some unpleasant.

The entire acting ensemble was perfectly selected and fitted their roles well.

I would like to see more movies of this quality made.

Three Cheers for director Gurinda Chadha who also co-wrote this is screenplay with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges.

See this movie and recommend it to your friends and family.

This is absolutely one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I can see it over and over again and discover new details and get fascinated of the story and all the actors' good work.

Watching this film is taking a joyride. All the different stories, and they are many and seems somewhat confusing in the beginning, is tied together as one in the end.

this movie is great for the entire family and talks about real issues. you get to see how four culturally different families have thanksgiving dinner- something that ties all americans together. it went by quickly and the actors portrayed their characters amazingly accurately. you must see this movie if you have even a slightly opened mind.

i've read a glowing review (above) and thought i might gave the movie a try. suffice to say, i was thoroughly disappointed. the story, switching from one family to another, seems jumpy and the flow was not well created. you often get lost where you are with which family.

the multi-cultural theme is all well and good but with shallow story lines between each family and the poor connection, the result is a film with irrelevant bits and pieces chucked together.

the acting was the only redeeming feature of the movie. the actors deserve full credit. i would have switched it off after twenty minutes were it not for decent acting. what irritated me the most though is the poor camerawork and editing. i caught, not just glimpses, the microphone appearing at the top of the screen three times.

I liked this film. I liked it more while I was watching it. I had to come back to liking it on my walk to the subway, after the rush of all the food on the screen wore off. The four story lines, in my opinion, are most palatable if swallowed as modern, urban parables. Over the top cliches? Yes. Simplistic moral lessons? Yes. But, it is juicy with humor and tender with decent sentiments. It's a holiday movie for the Age of Diversity. I doubt it will remain fresh over time. As for the turkey basters, don't ask.

A vivid depiction of four ethnically varied families celebrating Thanksgiving in The City of Angels. Great performances by nearly everyone in this large ensemble cast. This movie makes you glad you are part of humanity. A richly textured, humorous movie, which also has substance -- and a lot of delicious-looking food. I enjoyed it a lot!