Pamela Gidley
Occupation
Actor
Liebestraum Review
Very Good
Mike Figgis channels David Lynch and the Coen brothers' Barton Fink in this atmospheric neo-noir about a journalist who gets involved with an old friend's wife on the eve of the destruction of a historic cast-iron building. Ironically enough, the building is the site of a years-earlier triple-murder/suicide, in which a vengeful husband killed two cheating lovers.... Putting this all together isn't simple, as Figgis's way-convoluted tale takes you down many a dream-sequenced road. But the ride is a fun one, and the cast is surprisingly apt.
The Little Vampire Review
Good
Just when you thought movies couldn't get any more ridiculous, along comes a film that poses the question, "Did Dracula ever have a teddy bear?" I'm talking, of course, about The Little Vampire, a movie about a nuclear family of vampires that feed on cows, live in Scotland, and make friends with the little kid from Jerry Maguire.
In The Little Vampire, Jonathan Lipnicki plays Tony Thompson, recent émigré to the Highlands. Rather than go the traditional route for Scottish fantasy and pick up a wooden sword and proclaim, "There can be only one," Tony begins dreaming of vampires. Night after night, Tony's slumber is disturbed as he dreams of a rite being performed by a clan of vampires. What it means, Tony has no clue. So Tony simply does what any other eight-year old stereotyped by cinema does: Goes to mommy (Pamela Gidley) and daddy (Tommy Hinkley), sleeps in their bed for the night, and then gets ridiculed by everyone he knows for his "wild vampire fantasies" during the day.
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Jane Austen's Mafia! Review
OK
To my knowledge, there's never been a Godfather spoof, let alone a good one. The cryptically-titled Jane Austen's Mafia! certainly isn't going to change that, but it isn't as bad as some recent spoofs (notably Mel Brooks' last 4 or 5 movies) have been. Thanks to the natural charm of Jay Mohr, an often-funny tale of corruption, casinos (offering Go Fish), showgirls, and the Macarena unfolds. The flip side is that much of Mafia! is not funny, resorting to fart and/or vomit humor to generate cheap laughs. The spoofs range from the obvious - Godfather, GoodFellas, Casino - to the unexpected - Forrest Gump, Jaws - which generally work well. Then again, maybe my expectations are so low I didn't notice how bad they really were.
The Little Vampire Review
Terrible
If Jonathan Lipnicki is washed up at 18 and looking back on his career as a button-cute child star, "The Little Vampire" is will very likely be the picture that embarrasses him most.
A quick, sloppy production of a throwaway script about a little boy who befriends a family of bloodsuckers and helps them recover a magic amulet, it suffers from a pungent collective apathy that wafts off the screen from the cast and crew. The little kids in the picture seem like they're just playing vampire in grandma's dusty attic and not really trying to participate in the plot. The grown-ups in the cast (including respectable actors like Richard E. Grant and John Wood) give let's-get-this-over-with performances and most scenes feel like the director didn't say "Cut!" so much as "Oh that's good enough let's just move on."
Lipnicki ("Stuart Little," "Jerry Maguire") plays Tony, a kid from California who has just moved into a small, renovated Scottish castle with his completely vanilla mother (Pamela Gidley) and father (Tommy Hinkley), a golf course designer hired to build new links for a local lord (Wood).
Continue reading: The Little Vampire Review