Word: santas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like children waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve, moviegoers had hopes for this one. Vince Vaughn and David Dobkin, the star and director of Wedding Crashers, reunite for a holiday comedy scripted by Dan Fogelman (one of the screenwriters of the Pixar movie Cars). Supporting Vaughn as the black sheep of the Claus clan and Paul Giamatti as Santa, the picture's got three Academy Award winners: Kathy Bates as their mother, Rachel Weisz as Fred's ill-used girlfriend and Kevin Spacey as a corporate type threatening to close down Santa's workshop. Giamatti and Miranda Richardson, who plays...
...sort of sub-prime-rate enforcer. He enrages the people whose holiday he's ruining and exasperates his meter-maid inamorata with big ideas never fulfilled, dinner dates blown off. Plying a Salvation Army scam, Fred lands in jail and is forced to call his brother Nick, a.k.a. Santa, to go his bail. That brings him to the North Pole, the prodigal son carrying a grudge as big as Santa's sack of gifts...
...child could predict what happens: Fred will learn the spirit of Christmas from his bro, and he'll use his street smarts to help Santa survive in the modern age. And if I were to tell you that, before going to the North Pole, Fred befriends a young black kid from an orphanage... But no, it's all too painfully predictable. Halfway through the movie, I gave up hoping it would display a modicum of logic, a sentence of sense, a subordinate clause of sanity. Besides, as Chico Marx so acutely observed, "There ain't so sanity clause...
...kids' questions about how that little thing goes into that big thing. But they may have to tangle with workplace issues on the North Pole assembly line. Either the elves are making the generic toys (a bike, a sled, a dreidel) that few kids ask for these days, or Santa is deep into copyright infrinement...
...monitoring the score,” Amaker said. “We came here to play three games total, and we have to see if we can put ourselves together and regroup.” Harvard will have a chance to recover when it meets UC Santa Barbara on Saturday, and closes the tournament against Northwestern State on Sunday afternoon. —Staff writer Jonathan Lehman can be reached at jlehman@fas.harvard.edu...