Day: November 5, 2007

Fred Claus blows, according to Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. Won’t matter…never matters! The family audience will fork over for anything Hollywood cranks out as long as it’s kid-friendly and well-marketed with two or three big names. (I often refused to take my kids to crap like this when they were young in the early to mid ’90s. Well, most of the time.)

Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti in Fred Claus.

“Even more confounding than this mirthless, misanthropic mess,” Honeycutt writes, “is the involvement of such talented people as Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates and Kevin Spacey. Holiday films invariably perform well opening week, and the reunion of Vaughn with Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin should give Warner Bros. a momentary holiday lift. It might not last long, though.

“One additional problem: Family films should not clock in at 115 minutes.

“The film isn’t just not funny, it is off-putting. The Claus family confrontations are poorly written, the occasional slapstick action is weakly executed — these look like warmed-over leftovers from Disney’s The Santa Clause series — and below-the-line contributions surprisingly mediocre for a Joel Silver production. With Santa Claus movies like this one, who needs Ebenezer Scrooge?”

I respect Shia Lebouf‘s on-screen energy, but I haven’t been a huge fan. There was no choice but to feel badly about his Transformers performance, and with his casting in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull he became known as Steven Spielberg‘s little protege. He has seemed too young, too obsequious, too eager to please his elders. All is forgiven, however, in the wake of his Chicago Walgreens bust a day and a half ago.

It’s obviously not a good or admirable thing to get drunk and then arrested, but Lebouf has at least removed the goody two-shoes stamp from his persona. Break open the bubbly — he’s gotten in touch with his inner Marlon Brando. He’s proved to the world he can be a rude lout who insults Walgreen security guards if he’s pissed off enough. He has come to not only understand but embody Tom Petty‘s “I Won’t Back Down” when some guy with a badge says, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re going to have to leave the premises.”

All hail the flawed, vulnerable regular guy he’s now become. No longer that smiling, well-behaved kid and no longer a beaming Spielberg puppet holding the space helmet on the cover of Vanity Fair. An hombre, a descendant of Neal Cassady…a guy you want on your side in a bar fight.

Got into San Francisco of the BART train around 1:45 pm. Another 15 minutes to find my way to the Triton Hotel, which looks cool from the outside (a kind of 1950s neo-Jetsons design) but the rooms are laundry closets with beds and TVs jammed inside. The girl at the front desk said mine was one of the hotel’s biggest rooms. In other words, they have the effrontery to cram people into rooms that are 2/3 or even half of this size. Two and a half stars for the Triton Hotel! Make it two!

Link pic snapped from room #501 of Triton Hotel, corner of Bush and Grant Streets — Monday, 11.5.07, 2:55 pm

I’m off to LAX to catch an 11:50 a.m. plane to San Francisco and this evening’s Castro theatre screening of There Will Blood. I’ll be silent until the late afternoon.

The Saturday Night Live opener two nights ago was a skit about a Halloween party thrown by Bill and Hilary Clinton and attended by all the Presidential candidates. Moderately funny material with the usual pointed thrusts (i.e., Hilary is a witch, nobody likes her), but the wow element came when a guy wearing a Barack Obama mask walked in, took off the mask and turned out to be the Real McCoy.

Barack to Hilary: “And may I say you make a lovely bride?” Bill: “She’s a witch.” Hilary: “Bill!”

The sustained cheers that Obama got when he took off his mask were, I thought, somewhat significant. All right, maybe not.

This parody reel isn’t all that clever or special — it’s simply a Hollywood movie countdown from 100 to 1 — but the clips are nicely chosen and very well-timed. Some dude named “AlonzoMosleyFBI” assembled it, claiming it was his first effort and his first YouTube post. It was previously linked on Roger Ebert‘s Answer Man column. Thanks to HE reader Richard Swank for the tip.

Because Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky Balboa kicked some surprising box-office ass ($80 million domestic, $150 million int’l) last year and similar-type earnings from his aging-Rambo remake may be in the offing, the MGM guys — holding high the attitude and aesthetic of Cannon Films in 2007 — are “in talks” with Stallone to direct and star in a remake of Death Wish, the 1974 Charles Bronson-Michael Winner film.

The belief seems to be that audiences weren’t into Jodie Foster and Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One, which was almost a literal Death Wish remake, because they thought it was too womanly-emotional. But they might have felt differently about a similar-type story with some hard guy blowing away the bad guys.

All right, cut it out, this is loony — no way is anyone going to be interested in seeing this story done again so soon after The Brave One. Plus there’s that pesky fact that New York City isn’t the crime capital it used to be in the early ’70s. If Stallone and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato are smart, they’ll think up a new locale and a new angle. And they won’t have Stallone’s Paul Kersey be an architect because no one will buy it.

Where credit is due: OK! is reporting that Katie Holmes ran the entire 26-mile New York City Marathon yesterday. She reportedly finished the race in 5 hours, 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Hats off, show of respect, eat my words.