Grumpy Old Men (1993)

Two cranky old neighbors in Minnesota, a lifetime of pranks, and Ann-Margret showing up across the street on a snowmobile at two in the morning. That’s Grumpy Old Men (1993), and it kicks off Feast Mode, a month of Thanksgiving movies Nic found the way any of us would, by googling “What’s a Thanksgiving movie?” It’s his pick and his first time seeing it. As a kid he had zero patience for old movies or movies about old people, and now, as he puts it, guess what? He’s a fucking old person now. Steve, meanwhile, rented this one with his parents more than once in high school, back when The Odd Couple and Some Like It Hot had already made him a full-blown Jack Lemmon guy.

What follows is a cozy, profane hang. Burgess Meredith, as John’s ninety-something dad, asks whether his son has “mounted” the new neighbor, which Steve rules is technically not a swear and somehow still the dirtiest way to say it. Both dads are horrified by a guest who announces you can learn a lot about a person from their bathroom (Nic’s house rules: eyes front, eat, talk to him, leave). Max’s basket of remotes sends Steve back to his audiophile dad’s LaserDisc setup and both of them straight into infomercial country, where Nic remembers life before the Magic Bullet, when he had to run fruit over with his car to make a smoothie. Steve gets wistful about a family wedding and the phases of life, bums himself out completely, and Nic has to remind him this was supposed to be Feast Mode.

Then there’s CPA Corner. Nic does this for a living, can’t let the IRS subplot go, and ranks it against Happy Gilmore in the growing genre of fake tax crises in Christopher McDonald movies. Throw in ice shanties, a fish release Steve says sounds like either a wail of terror or the most horrifying orgasm anyone has ever heard, and Walter Matthau’s face, which Nic nominates as the universal icon for something that smells really bad.

Pull up a bucket by the fishing hole and stay a while.