Fred Claus: The Heeb Review
I don’t mean to be a Scrooge, but is there anybody out there who enjoys all the travel tie-ups, the excessive use of red and green and those bell-ringing Santas everywhere? Yes, everywhere you look, there’s Christmas and all of its discontents. But one rather welcome way Christmas gets in our faces every year is through movies, and the first of this year’s crop is “Fred Claus“:http://fredclaus.warnerbros.com/.
Regrettably, they messed up marketing this film. Despite the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other jokes involving elves found on the film’s promotional materials, this is not Elf 2. Nevertheless, this most recent addition to the merry mix of Christmas cinema from the creators of Wedding Crashers doesn’t deserve a stocking full of coal. Vince Vaughn’s eternally shleppy countenance actually works quite well as the curmudgeonly brother of Father Christmas. As repo-man Fred, he is a bit jealous of his overachieving little (large, red) brother. Paul Giamatti plays Santa from a fresh angle, as a stressed out entrepreneur who runs the North Pole as a business with a December “crunch time.” There’s some formulaic, but good comedy here, including a “Siblings Anonymous” segment featuring Bill Clinton’s brother (and less surprisingly, a Baldwin) and a scene in which Fred intrudes on a Hasidic family’s Friday night dinner and they offer him some challah.
Regrettably, they messed up marketing this film. Despite the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other jokes involving elves found on the film’s promotional materials, this is not Elf 2. Nevertheless, this most recent addition to the merry mix of Christmas cinema from the creators of Wedding Crashers doesn’t deserve a stocking full of coal. Vince Vaughn’s eternally shleppy countenance actually works quite well as the curmudgeonly brother of Father Christmas. As repo-man Fred, he is a bit jealous of his overachieving little (large, red) brother. Paul Giamatti plays Santa from a fresh angle, as a stressed out entrepreneur who runs the North Pole as a business with a December “crunch time.” There’s some formulaic, but good comedy here, including a “Siblings Anonymous” segment featuring Bill Clinton’s brother (and less surprisingly, a Baldwin) and a scene in which Fred intrudes on a Hasidic family’s Friday night dinner and they offer him some challah.
comments
submit a comment11.29.07 at 1:11 pm
I’m waiting for a Santa Clauss movie that shows him to me a dirty-old-man craving little boys to molest. The scenes would be a recreation of the actual case histories of those Catholic priests as revealed in their court trials that found them guilty.
11.30.07 at 2:11 pm
Yoesh , I too am waiting for that movie.
I can just imagine the response from Bill O’Reilly. He already rants about a “war on Christmas.”
12.05.07 at 3:12 pm
Dear Iconic, Yes, we know what Bill O’Reilly will think and write, for his deep-rooted Catholic-Irish anti-Semitism is well known: Immigrant parents or grandparents to America having to work as servants in maybe Jewish households and ask Jewish landlords to postpone the rent and — fueled by their god-damned priests — blame all their problems on the christ-killing Jews.
What shouldn’t be expected, though, but sadly will happen, are the so-called rabbis who feel they have to defend their goy friends by trashing HEEB and the other proudly Jewish yet irreverently anti-goy vehicle, Jesus Mishegahs:The Jewish Xmas Book, the latter exposing jesus as a bum.
12.06.07 at 12:12 am
What is it about “the so-called rabbis” that causes them to suck up to their goy pals-and shovel shmuts at fellow Tribesmen??