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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.

Josh Brolin shared an observation earlier today about Lewellyn Moss, his No Country for Old Men character, that had never come to mind. The first and only time Lewellyn really smiles in the whole film is at the very end, when he’s talking to that woman sitting next to the pool, the one who wants to share some beers.

I mentioned that I loved the first intimate scene between Lewellyn and his girlfriend Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) because of how they sit close and don’t look at each other…casual, unforced…you know in less than 10 seconds these two have a great relationship. Brolin says “it was a conscientious decision not to look at each other….these people are going to be together for the rest of their lives, and you call tell that absolutely. I like that, man. Makes me happy. I’ve been going through all those shitty interviews…”

We talked about some other stuff besides, including a short film he’s made called X that he’s hoping will be shown at the Sundance or Santa Barbara Film Festivals. Here’s the mp3.

Laundry-listing the violent movies of November-December, N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James wonders if viewers “really want a river of blood” at this time of year or any for that matter. The turn-off factor is not blood or bleeding itself — it’s the sense that the director is indulging some kind of blood-pain fetish and trying to arouse the audience into sharing in it the way a master chef will tantalize diners with a whiff of some special sauce.

The only ’07 movie that seemed to play this game, by my standards, wasDavid Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, which James acknowledges is “probably the year’s bloodiest film.” I’ve called it a Russian penis movie — queer for knives, reeking with odious machismo, seeming to lust for the thrill of dominance and the stabbing and slicing of flesh. I hated, hated, hated it, and I’m speaking as a worshipper of A History of Violence.

The only other film that may, according to buzz, be guilty of a blood fetish is Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd. The word is that in certain scenes the blood comes in gobs, torrents, rivers.

I’m cool with the “red, red vino” in all the others — the visually witty bloodlettings in No Country for Old Men, the faint use of the stuff in American Gangster, etc. There Will Be Blood shows it, I recall, in exactly one scene — the notorious final one. I don’t know why James even mentioned Lions for Lambs since it barely shows any traces of hurt or redness or anything.

I’m wondering which films may have struck others as too much, too sticky, too covered with the stuff. Not just this year but anytime since blood became allowable or semi-fashionable.

As she writes about speaking with Into The Wild‘s Hal Holbrook, who is perhaps the lead contender for Best Supporting Actor at this stage by virtue of being the reigning old-guy veteran who finally deserves an Oscar after all these years (a.k.a., the Alan Arkin rationale), Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone writes that “from the day your kids are born you can never do enough, never be enough, never give enough compared what your hopes and dreams for them are. And parenting is nothing but a long series of mistakes, with minor miracles here and there, that you hope amount to something good in the end.”

“The general formula for most filmmaking could be broken down thusly: concept + stars + brute-force marketing = hoped-for payday. The studio system, with a need to appeal to plenty of people with huge opening weekends, does not generally lead to great cinema. But when the hydraulics of prestige are introduced into that equation, odd and wonderful things can happen.

“Big paydays are forgone by actors, directors work with (and for) far less money, and studios put money and promotion into films that have limited financial horizons. Actors, producers and directors know that when all is said and done, their obituaries are not going to mention their lifetime box-office tallies. The Oscars, by forcefully acknowledging artistic excellence, help people access the angels of their better natures.” — from David Carr‘s 11.4 N.Y. Times piece called “The Little Gold Man Made Me Do It.”