It's Thanksgiving week, the official kick-off to the Christmas season that hit the drugstores in my neighborhood the day after Halloween, and a time when we here at the Screengrab, responding to the smell of fresh gingerbread and mistletoe, throw off our usual habit of jeering at and making cruel sport of movie directors and actors and, with a hearth's worth of love burning in our chests, jeer at and make cruel sport of rich, shitty painters. Like, say, Thomas Kinkade, the self-made douchebag whose work has inspired this tribute from novelist and essayist Joan Didion: "A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." Didion makes it sound as if Kinkade's work might provide inspiration for Tim Burton, but when Kinkade sort of got into the movie business last year, he chose not to travel down that pop-Gothic path. Instead, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, which lists Kinkade as one of its many producers, is a seriously goopy coming-of-age story that tells how young Thomas--played by Jared Padalecki, the guy who took Rory Gilmore's virginity, the two-timing son of a bitch--came to paint his masterpiece, to which the movie's title refers. Joining Dean in the cast are Marcia Gay Hardin as Mama Kinkade, Ed Asner, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Moll--he was too busy to show up for the Night Court reunion on 30 Rock, but for this he skipped golf?--and Chris Elliott, who was probably just looking for something to talk about the next time he's booked on David Letterman. The big "get" was Peter O'Toole, who gets to mentor the hero by swanning about, crooning "Paint the light, Thomas, paint the light!" If you think of O'Toole's performance as a parody of John Gielgud's in Shine, you may be able to watch him while only throwing up in your mouth a little.
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