The holiday season is approaching, and we're easing our way into it as well! Our first film, set around Christmas, is directed by Jon Turteltaub and written by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow. The story follows Lucy (Sandra Bullock), a subway toll-booth worker for the Chicago Transit Authority, who develops a huge crush on a handsome rider, Peter (Peter Gallagher) who comes through her booth every day. When he is attacked on the platform and falls onto the tracks, Lucy springs into action and saves him. Later on, at the hospital, she is daydreaming and talking to herself about how she was going to marry him. A nurse overhears her, assumes she is Peter's fiance, and announces her as such when his family arrives. Lucy protests, but is steamrolled by Peter's family. She soon finds herself swept into the family she never had by Peter's father Ox (Peter Boyle), his mother Midge (Micole Mercurio), family friend, and Peter's godfather, Saul (Jack Warden), family matriarch Elsie (Glynis Johns), and little sister Mary (Monica Keena). But it's meeting Peter's younger brother Jack (Bill Pullman) that really starts one of the strangest love triangles on film! A few plot holes, but they don't really detract from this sweet, enjoyable film, set during the December holidays!

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Our second Thanksgiving holiday pairing film is also focused on the art of the dance, this time from 1987. Baby (Jennifer Grey) travels with her Dad (Jerry Orbach), her mom (Kelly Bishop), and her sister Lisa (Jane Brucker) to Kellerman's, a family retreat in the Catskills, for a week's vacation. There, Baby meets Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) and Johnny (Patrick Swayze), the "dance people," and is smitten with Johnny immediately. When Penny needs to take a night off, Baby volunteers to fill in, even though she has no dance experience. What starts as preparation for a single event builds to a romance and a declaration of love and freedom set in 1963, just before President Kennedy was assassinated. Directed by Emile Ardolino and written by Eleanor Bergstein, the movie "Dirty Dancing" became THE love story of the 1980s, and the soundtrack became, and is still, equally beloved! And the trio explain how they're edging into the Christmas holidays with their next two films!

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Beginning our more family-friendly dance-film Thanksgiving holiday pairing, we're beginning with one of the four major dance films of the 80s, and one that made Kevin Bacon the household name (and focus of the "Six Degress of Separation" game), 1984's "Footloose!" Directed by Herbert Ross and written by Dean Pitchford (based on an actual event), the film follows Ren McCormack (Bacon) who has just moved to a small Oklahoma town with his mother (Frances Lee McCain), and finds the environment stifling to say the least. And for a kid from the streets of Chicago, the nightlift leaves a lot to be desired, especially since he can't even dance, thanks to a town ordinance forbidding such physical expression. He quickly meets the source of the rule, Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) who rails in church about the evils of sex and alcohol, both of which he links to dancing. His zealous ideals are balanced by his strong, soft-spoken wife Vi (Dianne Wiest) and tested by his hellion daughter Ariel (Lori Singer). Add in Ren's friends Willard (Chris Penn) and Woody (John Laughlin), Ariel's best friend Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker), Ariel's jerk ex-boyfriend Chuck Cranston (Jim Youngs) and Ren's new boss Andy (Timothy Scott) and you have all the right people for a coming-of-age story set against the small-town mindset during the Reagan years!

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The second B-Movie in our pairing comes from just two years later than our first! Director Phillip Noyce took the formula perfected in the Zatoichi series of films from Japan about a blind samurai. Actor Tim Matheson wanted to produce, and brought the idea of making an American version of the films, through two directors, three studios, seven years, and eleven drafts of the screenplay, to TriStar pictures, before getting it made. The story follows former Vietnam solder Nick Parker (Rutger Hauer), blinded by mortar fire, and taught to fight with a samurai sword by kindly villagers. He returns to the U.S. to find his former squad-mate, Frank Devereaux (Terry O'Quinn). After discovering that Frank and his wife have divorced, Nick ends up being tasked to escort Frank's son, Billy, to his father in Reno. Along the way, harassed by people working for mob boss MacCready (Noble Willingham) who have captured Frank and are forcing him to create drugs for him, Nick must find a balance between completing his own quest and protecting Frank's son on his. Plus, the trio reveal which two dance-based films will be part of their Thanksgiving-time pairing!

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