Fred Claus

There's nothing I like better than kicking off the holiday season watching Christmas movies. At my house, Elf, Christmas Vacation and Ernest Saves Christmas are perennial favorites and more to our (questionable) taste than some of the classics (downers) like It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol. So the day after Thanksgiving, we braved the traffic to see Fred Claus, a movie I'd been looking forward to for quite some time because I love, love, love Vince Vaughn (cuddly).

To be honest, Fred Claus is not a great film. Some would argue it's not even a very good film. It only has a fresh rating of 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I don't care. I still enjoyed it.

At its very core, Fred Claus is a story about a dysfunctional family. Vince Vaughn plays the embittered older brother to Paul Giamatti's stressed-out Santa (Nick), Miranda Richardson is the nagging, yet well-meaning Mrs. Claus, Rachel Weisz is Fred's long-suffering girlfriend, Kathy Bates is the overbearing and overly critical mother who obviously prefers her younger son, and Kevin Spacey is a villain with an old grudge and some really cool eye specs.

The snow globe is probably my favorite part of the movie, but I also love the bit where Fred goes to a Siblings Anonymous meeting to talk about what it's like living in his brother's shadow only to find that he has to wait his turn behind Roger Clinton, Frank Stallone and Stephen Baldwin.

I'm not exactly going to recommend Fred Claus because it does have a lot of weaknesses and it's not nearly as funny as I had hoped. But I will say this--it's a beautiful-looking movie and it certainly put me in the Christmas spirit. So I got what I wanted from it.