1. Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone!

2. Yesterday was my first ‘solo’ Thanksgiving. My stuffing didn’t turn out very well, but at least I had some turkey legs.

Per tradition I opened the holiday season with a viewing of The Star Wars Holiday Special courtesy of rifftrax (“there’s murder in his eyes; I like where this is heading!”). Honestly, it’s mostly the commercials that start getting me in the holiday spirit. Vintage shows complete with commercials feel a bit like a time capsule, letting you imagine that this is really 1978 again.

3. On that note, I think one of the appeals of the idea of time travel – of escaping back into the past – is simply that you know what to expect. If you go back in time to 1955, well, you know more or less what’s going to happen. There’s none of the uncertainty of looking to the future. That’s an aspect of time travel that doesn’t seem to get mentioned much, from what I can tell.

4. Speaking of time capsules, I recently saw The Breakfast Club for the first time. My main takeaway was ‘wow, these kids could act!’ In a lot of ways it feels like a stage play, with a very limited set and being done almost entirely through dialogue.

It’s also a lot more downbeat and cynical than you might expect from John Hughes, ending on a bittersweetly uncertain note as the kids leave school without any confirmation that they’ll still be friends come Monday (though as four of the five have started smooching, you’d think they’ll at least keep going for a bit). Ultimately, the kids end the film still in a bad place, just having opened up to one another about it. How much effect that will have on their lives or relationships going forward is left for the audience to decide.

5. Before that I saw another 80s comedy in Better Off Dead, a surreal black comedy about a teenager whose girlfriend (played by Amanda Wyss, better known as Freddy Krueger’s first victim) dumps him for the head of a ski team, prompting him to repeated suicide attempts which all fail in absurd ways (e.g. he tries to jump off a bridge, he changes his mind, only for his friend to accidentally push him…but he lands safely in a passing garbage truck, prompting a line worker to comment on how it’s “a shame to see someone throwing away a perfectly good white boy like that”). Meanwhile he strikes up a friendship with a French exchange student who is stuck living with a harridan of a single mom and her awkward son.

It’s a cartoonish, rather surreal film that’s probably not going to appeal to everyone, but personally I found it hilarious. It struck me as a bit like a teenage equivalent to A Christmas Story, where what we get is more the protagonist’s perspective, only with more of an absurdist filter. Like how his mother cooks absolutely inedible slop (which sometimes moves when you poke at it), or his little brother never talks, but invents high-tech gadgets from mail-order kits (“Build your own space shuttle!”). Or the psychotic paper boy who pursues the protagonist for his two dollar fee with the implacable determination of a horror villain.

It’s not a great film, but as I say, I really enjoyed it: it’s just the sort of bizarre-yet with-a-discernible-internal-logic tone that I like.

6. I feel like I should have more to say about The Breakfast Club than Better Off Dead. And I really do, but I feel once I start delving into Breakfast Club, it could easily run away with me for pages and pages. Maybe. It’s definitely a great film with a lot of meat on it.

7. Another excellent video by Pilgrim’s Pass on the importance of chivalric / pulp heroes, including a fascinating summary of the life of Miguel Cervantes that gives some much-appreciated context for his book.