Fred Claus on blu-ray

Vince Vaughn is enormously enjoyable as the titular Fred Claus, disgruntled older brother of the better-known St. Nicholas himself, i.e., the North Pole’s very own Santa (Paul Giamatti). A garrulous hustler running from the emotional fallout of the ultimate sibling rivalry, poor Fred keeps trying to find happiness through one failed scheme after another, pushing away the people who care about him most. When brother Santa puts the squeeze on him to help out in the toy factory atop the world, Fred turns the place into one big, raucous party. Unfortunately, he’s unaware that Santa and Mrs. Claus (Miranda Richardson) are under tight scrutiny from an oversight committee (represented by a calculating Kevin Spacey) and could be shut down.

The film, directed by David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers), gleams and twinkles the way a holiday movie should, and has plenty of fun material for youngsters, including a wacky chase scene in which Fred goes on the run from a half-dozen, angry Salvation Army Santas. But Fred Claus is also supposed to appeal to hip adults with a taste for ironic farce, and on that score the movie feels like a succession of Saturday Night Live skits more than an organic whole. Still, Vaughn holds everything together with a smart, insightful performance that looks deep into his character’s torment–with more than a few laughs.

Read more about Fred Claus

L.A. Confidential on blu-ray.

In a time when it seems that every other movie makes some claim to being a film noir, L.A. Confidential is the real thing–a gritty, sordid tale of sex, scandal, betrayal, and corruption of all sorts (police, political, press–and, of course, very personal) in 1940s Hollywood. The Oscar-winning screenplay is actually based on several titles in James Ellroy’s series of chronological thriller novels (including the title volume, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz)–a compelling blend of L.A. history and pulp fiction that has earned it comparisons to the greatest of all Technicolor noir films, Chinatown.

Kim Basinger richly deserved her Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a conflicted femme fatale; unfortunately, her male costars are so uniformly fine that they may have canceled each other out with the Academy voters: Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and James Cromwell play LAPD officers of varying stripes. Pearce’s character is a particularly intriguing study in Hollywood amorality and ambition, a strait-laced “hero” (and son of a departmental legend) whose career goals outweigh all other moral, ethical, and legal considerations. If he’s a good guy, it’s only because he sees it as the quickest route to a promotion.

Read more about L.A. Confidential

Outbreak on Blu-ray

When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston’s terrifying nonfiction book The Hot Zone (purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the U.S., added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), and produced an unusual thriller–a surprise hit–called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, fell through. The premise of Outbreak, which owes something to Elia Kazan’s 1950 plague-scare movie, Panic in the Streets, is as terrifying as it is timely. As developers slash their way deeper into the previously unexplored tropical rainforests, they are exposed to radically new forms of life, including diseases, that in these days of commonplace international travel could turn into deadly epidemics almost before we know it.

Hoffman’s character and his estranged wife (Rene Russo) are disease experts called in to identify the unknown killer, which was carried into the country by an illegally smuggled monkey. The best sequence shows the disease spreading–through recycled air on a passenger jet, or a sneeze in a crowded movie theater. The final chase is pretty conventional, but the cast is terrific, including Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., J.T. Walsh, and Zakes Mokae.

Read more about Outbreak

21 on Blu-ray

An unconvincing exercise in moral complexity, 21 is based on Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) plays brilliant, blue-collar scholar Ben Campbell, whose doubts that he’ll win a scholarship to Harvard Medical School compel him to join a secret, M.I.T. gang of math whiz kids. Under the silky but chilling command of a math professor (Kevin Spacey), Jim and the others master card counting, i.e., the statistical analysis of cards dealt in blackjack games. The team lives a humdrum existence during the week, but on weekends in Sin City, the students are rolling in cash, going to exclusive clubs, and feeling on top of the world. (Ben even gets the girl: a comely, fellow counter played by Kate Bosworth.) Despite all that success, Ben feels ethically compromised, and indeed director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde), in the old tradition of American movies, plays it both ways where fun vices are concerned.

On the one hand, it feels so good; on the other, ahem, we know it’s wrong. That studied ambivalence proves wearing after a while, making the most interesting character in the film a casino watchdog played by Laurence Fishburne. A master at reading the emotions of gamblers beating the house with a scam, he’s admirable for being good at his job, but repellent for wrecking the faces of counters in casino dungeons. He’s all about moral complexity in the tradition of anti-heroes, and a truly provocative element in an otherwise superficial movie.
By Tom Keogh

Read more about 21