Greg Mottola's low-pressure charmer Adventureland hasn't done the business it deserved, but as a major studio release, it at least stands the chance of an afterlife on DVD. Maybe if the gods are kind, somebody will roll the dice on getting Mottola's debut film, The Daytrippers, back into print on home video. When this comedy first started drifting into theaters in 1997, it stood apart from the indie-film pack for its unflashiness and lack of condescension towards its middle-class characters. Seen today, it may inspire a certain nostalgia for its movie era: here are the indie-film all-stars of the late '90s in the full bloom of youth, before they started lining up to take on Wolverine or competing with each other to see whose new TV series could get cancelled quickest. The Daytrippers begins with Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as an apparently happily married couple living in Long Island. Tucci works at a Manhattan publishing firm, and after he heads off for work with plans not to be back home for a couple of days, Davis finds what seems to be a love letter that was written to him by someone named Sandy. Confused and nervous, Davis invites her family--including her parents (Anne Meara and Pat McNamara), her sister (Parker Posey), and the sister's boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber)-- to talk her into believing that it's nothing. The upshot is that the whole pack winds up venturing into the city to confront Tucci, piled into a broken-down station wagon with a busted heater on a late-November day that isn't getting any warmer.

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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.

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