This was a special Thanksgiving for me. I spent it with a wonderful woman who’s become very special to me. And we pulled out all the stops for the meal, although we didn’t have anyone else over for dinner. Yup, that means leftovers all weekend.

This was the first year I cooked a real turkey. In previous years, tofurkey would substitute or I’d end up at a friend’s table. So this year I got to experience the truth about preparing a turkey dinner.

Preparing a whole turkey isn’t a pretty sight. It’s squishy and bloody, and it has moments of pure “EW!” involved. But I think it’s a good thing, having to deal with the blood and entrails- I think that the mere act of preparing a thanksgiving dinner forces one to consider the realities of life. In our modern world of prepackaged convenience foods we’re increasingly cut off from the truth of our appetites. Life feeds on death, and that’s how it always has been. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.

So when you do eat, I think it’s good to- once in a while- say a silent ‘Thank You’ to the creature your burger or meatloaf used to be. Preparing our turkey meal was an excellent reminder to me, to be more thankful.

And speaking of being thankful- this has been an interesting year for me, and I’ve gotten the opportunity to do lots of amazing film, video, and web projects with some very cool people.

This has also been the year I became a real working director. That’s so awesome, and I sometimes can’t believe I get paid to do something I love. Despite the fact that the projects are generally low budget affairs, I have a great time and I love hearing my clients’ reactions when they see my work- it is very gratifying.

I’m thankful for the good- and the good people- in my life. I have an amazing family and some truly outstanding friends. This year a lot of you got to step up and help me through some rough stuff- and I thank you for that. You know who you are. Thank you.

And yes, what I am most thankful for this year is meeting the woman I spent this Thanksgiving with. She’s incredible.

Robert Altman died last night. The old coot was truly a talented director, and he was one of the few people in Hollywood I looked up to. He’s one of the reasons I got into making movies.

I’ve always loved Altman’s dedication to his vision- unlike a lot of insecure directors, Altman knew what he wanted and he wasn’t afraid to make movies his way. Sure, he directed a lot of clunkers along with his list of massively successful movies. But every one of his films had heart. He was a rare man in Hollywood who wasn’t afraid to make movies that would force his audience to think and feel differently. The guy had guts.

If you haven’t seen an Altman movie in a while, click here to see the list of his films on IMDB. I’m sure there’s at least 2 of them which you have not yet seen that’ll surprise you and make you glad you have NetFlix.

My videos on Revver

This was far too good not to copy and paste. Link here. This is why I don’t write and don’t support these new “torture-based” horror movies:

Barring a wave of sweet mercy and enlightenment sweeping the nation, by the time you read this, “Saw III” will be the No. 1 movie in America. The “Saw” series revolves around the cruel stylings of Jigsaw, who traps his victims in fiendish puzzles that they must solve as the clock winds down. A woman wakes up to find herself fitted with the retainer from hell, a spring-loaded device that will rip her head apart unless she can fish the key out of the entrails of her companion, who’s understandably dubious. The lesson here is to never get sideways of a maniac with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Halloween typically leaves the box office slicked with blood, but October’s fare was particularly hemorrhagic. I give you “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,” yet another gory terpsichore through the heart of Bush Country. Taken together with “Hostel,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “Wolf Creek” and “The Devil’s Rejects” (and their ineluctable sequels), these films constitute a quickening sub-genre of horror movies, the ultra-violent torture flick, or as Entertainment Weekly has dubbed it, “claustrophobic cruelty.”

Here diners at the feast of American life might be tempted to say, “Check, please!” The very notion of torture chic is profoundly dispiriting. Has our culture become so debased, so desperate for frisson that films glorifying inquisitional agony can find an audience? Well, duh.

Before you even start, horror fans, I get it: Commerce in images of cruelty is nothing new. From Seneca to Shakespeare—whose arm-chopping, head-lopping, children-baked-in-a-pie “Titus Andronicus” is the weirdest carnage in English literature—there’s always been a theatrical appetite for violent depravity. Nor is it a peculiarly American appetite. Witness Chinese martial arts films and Italian mondo horror. For world cinema, blood is a primary color.

But there is a quantitative difference between this year’s dicers and anything that pioneering gore-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis ever made, and that’s the size of the audience. Exploitation flicks were once cult films, consigned to grind-houses, drive-ins and other shame-based venues. “Saw” I and II have a worldwide box office of nearly $250 million and counting. “Hostel,” a movie where a young woman has her eye burned out with a blowtorch, has made $80 million worldwide since January. A butcher blockbuster, if you will.

I walked into a Sunday matinee of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” expecting the theater would be empty. It wasn’t. Perhaps 100 people were there, and while most in the audience were teenagers—slasher films’ primary demographic—a lot of them were Gen-X’ers and older. Uh-oh.

“Chainsaw” is supposed to be scary, I guess. Except that it’s such a piece of genre apparatus, with conventions so smoothly grooved from decades of use and so generously lubricated with blood—imperiled hottie teenagers, cannibal psycho-billies (and not the good kind), falling-down house of horrors—all that’s left to ponder is the stunning, bone-and-gristle violence.

In one scene, Leatherface nails one of the heroes to a vivisection table and flays the poor lad’s forearms to the radius and ulna. Then he gets downright unpleasant. With the movie’s eponymous power tool, he guts the poor kid, then filets his face off—all while the boy’s girlfriend hides below the table, drenched in runnels of blood and organ juice. Popcorn?

There’s also a qualitative difference. Older slasher films—such as the original 1974 “Chainsaw” by Tobe Hooper—were by current standards pretty delicate. They were carefully, not to say responsibly, edited to cut away at or just after the spattering moment of impact. Look-away editing is a thing of the past. This film—and I can only assume its genre contemporaries—is a work of unblinking sadism, cold and profanely explicit. It’s astonishing that the filmmakers actually had to pare back 17 scenes in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. Geez, what did they cut? Never fear, sociopaths, these scenes will be restored for the unrated DVD release.

For me, the worst horror was not on the screen. A half-hour into this film, a mother brought her son, no more than 9 years old, into the theater. To that woman, wherever you are: What in Christ’s name is wrong with you?

I don’t want to come off as the Tipper Gore of gore, but I can’t help wondering: How far can this line be pushed? How far into the mainstream can these images reach? When the guys on “CSI” take the revving bone saw to the bloated corpse of some poor floater, why is there no outrage, no network boycotts? I guess so long as we don’t see her nipple.

Forgive me. I’ve been working with this material for a couple of days now. I’ve read the blogs and contended with the defenders of this vile trash. I’ve tried to keep an open mind. And at the end of it, I just want to let out a biblical howl of despair.

I don’t know exactly what these awful movies say about us, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t good.