Best Thanksgiving movie ever?

Faced with a long weekend of endless meals, bloated recoveries and awkward family interactions, watching celluloid avatars suffer the same pitfalls might be the perfect tension diffuser. Here, then, are some takes on the Best Thanksgiving Movies list. About.com’s Top 8 is uneven, starting strong with Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters at number one, followed thusly by some quality indie fare, then less credible entries:

2. Home for the Holidays

3. The House of Yes

4. Mighty Joe Young (the original)

5. The Ice Storm

6. Miracle on 34th Street

7. Planes, Trains. Automobiles

8. Pieces of April

Jodie Foster, Parker Posey and suburban malaise, certainly, but Santa, gorillas and Katie Holmes? More thoughts after the jump.

Things really drop off during the second half of About.com’s Thanksgiving flicks list. We’re already being assaulted by clichéd Christmas narratives and products, do we really need Mircale on 34th Street to remind us that we’ll be seeing all these crazy people again in a month? Perhaps the solution is a complementary 5 Best Thanksgiving Movies list from MSNBC.

Beside confirming Hannah and Her Sisters and The House of Yes, MSNBC’s John Hartl contributes Giant, a classic Rock Hudson-Liz Taylor Western melodrama from George Stevens, and Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant, a counter-culture classic from the 60s about a hippie Thanksgiving. Both make great family screening fodder, and neither feature Santa. Hartl gets a little greedy though, and suggests another great downer from Ice Storm director Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain, which merely features a Thanksgiving scene that, though pivotal, bears little relevance to its overarching themes.

With all these semi-Thanksgiving movies making Thanksgiving movie lists, I’ll throw my own recommendation into the mix: the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here’s why:

• The bovine slaughterhouse imagery will make the family really happy to be eating poultry, or, for the veggies, glad to not be eating meat at all.
• No matter how messed up your family may seem, there’s no chance this screen family seems better off, right?
• It’s a super-awesome movie, while the films listed above are awesome at best.
• Awkward as your Thanksgiving meal may seem, it can’t possibly be worse than this:

Worst. Family. Dinner. Ever.