To me, this movie is perfection.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Hallmark does have a good history of airing original movies that are good. Which is why I like to watch them when I canThe Thanksgiving House is one of those films you can actually sit down and watch to appreciate for it's original plot and acting which is what Hallmark is known to do.With the cast being: Emily Rose,Justin Bruening,Julia Jones,Lindsay Wagner,Bruce Boxleitner,Cerina Vincent,Adam Kaufman,Jack Scalia each one help tell the story of the movie Emily's performance stands out the most because her character stuck out the most with Justin's performance coming in second. Cerina's character really shows out to be the bad apple in terms The music was wonderful it was everything you would want in a movie like this and then some I just enjoy the score all together it was peaceful and joyful it set the tone of the movie. The setting is good as well.Overall I enjoy the story, the acting and the music it just really good to have a Thanksgiving theme movie I give The Thanksgiving House an 8 out of 10

I liked the aspect of combining historic sentiment with this Holiday. This movie also had several underlying themes and I totally enjoyed the greedy boyfriend getting his "do" while riding off into the sunset with his greedy "sidekick". Family values and the family setting are shown as true to life - all families have their issues. It is always good to look at the other side of the "coin" and this movie weaves "food for thought" into the plot. What better holiday to "bring home the family values while respecting history". It showed that the busy grind of today and money over family is not always alive and well. Today the lifestyle is losing traditions and any traditions like Thanksgiving need to be kept alive and kicking. It also gave me thought as to the real history of the first Thanksgiving and made be want to go to New England again. I wish this movie would come out on DVD. So glad Hallmark has autumn and Thanksgiving movies!

Thanksgiving has a special interest for me, or I might not have watched "The Thanksgiving House," which is an exceptionally well made chick flick. In it, the romance at the center also serves as metaphor, because it has a weighty theme: about sitting down to dinner with someone who might, or might not, be your enemy. My regret is that more parallels weren't drawn between our modern Thanksgivings and the legendary first one, because more interesting similarities were there to be drawn, and the movie would have been richer for suggesting them-- and I do mean suggesting, very lightly suggesting, because this isn't a documentary.Briefly, the plot revolves around the land occupied by a house at 825 Mayflower Road in Plymouth, Mass. (fictional address, of course), which a local historian/archaeologist named Mather suspects was the site of the legendary first Thanksgiving. The house now belongs to a lawyer named Mary, and the movie opens with a scene in her law office, where she exposes a man in his attempt at insurance fraud. So she's in the business of finding the truth, which is good, but as a lawyer, her real motives are serving her client, keeping the firm profitable, and climbing the corporate ladder. Right there we have a parallel: are the hard truths about early American history something we want exposed, at the expense of our more immediate day-to-day motives and beliefs? After all, to many Native Americans in New England and around the country, Thanksgiving is considered a "Day of Mourning."After that scene, I expected a connection to a larger theme: exposing the myth that has been built up around that original Thanksgiving, a myth that buries the truth about colonists and pilgrims who, after that one-time feast in 1621, were less likely to dine together than to scalp each other. (Yes, Europeans scalped Indians. In fact, colonial leaders placed a bounty on scalps, which encouraged the practice so much that even Native children were scalped for the money. Indians used scalping as proof of a kill in battle.)Little true history is revealed, which is fair enough: little is known about the first Thanksgiving. (Indeed, there are competing "first" claims from Virginia and Florida, among others.) There is a classroom scene, in which a teacher talks about the Wampanoag sitting down with pilgrims to give thanks, and a student asks "How'd that work out for the Wampanoag?" The teacher somberly, evasively replies, "In the long run, not so well." Not so well... that's putting it mildly. But the truth is not chick- flick material, and I therefore appreciate that such a scene was included at all. I only wish there had been more such references, necessarily oblique, to America's "aboriginal sin," as it is called. The film could also, for example, have had a passing remark about the fact there was only ever that one Thanksgiving, in 1621. Indians and pilgrims became enemies. Another missed opportunity, an important one given the house which is at the center of the plot: Indians did not hold private land, so a point could have been made about how Mary comes from the European heritage of land-owning, so she does not even want an archaeological examination of her property. How she comes to share her property would have made a useful food-for-thought parallel.And speaking of food, here, for what it is worth, is my special interest in Thanksgiving. I am a part of an initiative called Thanksgiving Table, which encourages all North Americans to add a Native American element to their Thanksgiving feast.

Emily Rose's great-aunt has just died and left Emily her house in Plymouth. Justin Bruening is an amateur archaeologist who has proof that the house is the site of the first Thanksgiving. It's a good set-up for a Hallmark romantic comedy and they carry it out nicely, aided by a supporting cast whose characters all know each other. No one is obnoxious; they simply want different things and that causes the conflicts. This is the definition of a good work of fiction, in which the story arises from character.The plot is good, the writing is good and the actors are good. However, while I wish all Hallmark romcoms were as good as this, I have some issues with the production that will probably strike most people as too picky. One is the fact that all of these people are natives of Massachusetts and only Adam Kaufman has even the faintest trace of a Yankee accent; he sounds like he comes from South Boston. The other is that they might have shot this in Massachusetts in the fall. While there are some setting helicopter shots to establish that, yes, this is Boston and yes, this is Plymouth, they clearly shot the exteriors some place else in the late spring. I spotted some tulips that looked like June and while dead leaves are scattered around, there is no sign of autumn colors. The credits indicate Simi Valley.These are, as I said, niggling issues. Nonetheless, they prevent it from being much more than average good.