It's Thanksgiving week, the official kick-off to the Christmas season that hit the drugstores in my neighborhood the day after Halloween, and a time when we here at the Screengrab, responding to the smell of fresh gingerbread and mistletoe, throw off our usual habit of jeering at and making cruel sport of movie directors and actors and, with a hearth's worth of love burning in our chests, jeer at and make cruel sport of rich, shitty painters. Like, say, Thomas Kinkade, the self-made douchebag whose work has inspired this tribute from novelist and essayist Joan Didion: "A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." Didion makes it sound as if Kinkade's work might provide inspiration for Tim Burton, but when Kinkade sort of got into the movie business last year, he chose not to travel down that pop-Gothic path. Instead, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, which lists Kinkade as one of its many producers, is a seriously goopy coming-of-age story that tells how young Thomas--played by Jared Padalecki, the guy who took Rory Gilmore's virginity, the two-timing son of a bitch--came to paint his masterpiece, to which the movie's title refers. Joining Dean in the cast are Marcia Gay Hardin as Mama Kinkade, Ed Asner, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Moll--he was too busy to show up for the Night Court reunion on 30 Rock, but for this he skipped golf?--and Chris Elliott, who was probably just looking for something to talk about the next time he's booked on David Letterman. The big "get" was Peter O'Toole, who gets to mentor the hero by swanning about, crooning "Paint the light, Thomas, paint the light!" If you think of O'Toole's performance as a parody of John Gielgud's in Shine, you may be able to watch him while only throwing up in your mouth a little.

Christmas Cottage lists a director, Michael Campus, who back in the 1970s was responsible for such pitcures as Z.P.G., The Mack, and The Education of Sonny Carson. Christmas Cottage, which went to DVD earlier this month after bypassing theatrical release, marks his first job behind the camera since 1976's The Passover Plot, a religious-conspiracy movie, based on a 1965 "nonfiction" book that argued that Jesus planned to fake his own death, so that he could subsequently "fulfill" Biblical prophecy by staging his own phony resurrection. The plan involved Jesus taking a drug that made it possible for him to appear dead while he was just contentedly taking a snooze while hanging on the cross. Then some smartass Roman soldier had to get frisky with a spear, and things got complicated. (In the movie, Jesus was played by Zalman King, now best known as the soft-core specialist responsible for Wild Orchid and the Red Shoe Diaries TV series.) We don't know if Campus was hired on Kinkade's say-so, but given the popularity of the painter's work among evanglical Christians, many of whom see him as a leading light in the field of sanctified schlock, he might have found Campus's background irresistable. We do know that Kinkade had a heavy hand in shaping the movie's look, thanks to the memo reproduced here by Vanity Fair, in an article (by Paul Cullum) that bears the touching headline, "Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck." It bears close examination. Let it be noted that twice, first in reference to the need to "Create an overall sense of soft edges" and in regard to "the pacing of the depth of field," he cites the example of Barry Lyndon. Somewhere in the hereafter, Stanley Kubrick is blinking fast and asking, "The fuck did I do!?".