Jonathan Lipnicki

Like a series of linked MAD TV skits done without regard to network censors - the humor is about that intelligent - the film presents the 1992 Rodney King beating and subsequent riots as a grand comic opera of greed and stupidity, going after everybody involved with equal vigor. One can get a feel for how writer/director Marc Klasfeld intends to approach his subject a few minutes in, when the car chase and police beating of King (T.K. Carter) is done as a jokey game, with a police helicopter pilot serving as the announcer ("and they're off!"), while the cops themselves, having pulled King over, place beats over the ethnicity of the guy inside. Then Snoop Dogg shows up - serving, appropriately enough, as the film's narrator and chorus - to introduce the film proper, while fireworks go off behind him.

Continue reading: The L.A. Riot Spectacular Review

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.

Continue reading: The Little Vampire Review

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

Fans of "Stuart Little," the classic E. B. White's children's book about a congenial little mouse with a wind-up red roadster, would be wise to avoid "Stuart Little," the mostly in-name-only big screen adaptation featuring Michael J. Fox's voice emanating from a computer-animated Stuart.

Nearly everything delightful about the book is erased or painted over here with near-plotless kiddie fare, predictably zany adventures and deliberately ham-fisted acting from a wildly talented cast (Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jeffrey Jones, Allyce Beasley, Estelle Getty, Julia Sweeney), entirely wasted on a Saturday morning cartoon script.

Ironically co-written by M. Night Shyamalan (the writer-director of "The Sixth Sense"), the story opens with Mr. and Mrs. Little on their way to an orphanage to pick out a kid for no explored reason. Won over by the home's least likely resident -- a talking mouse named Stuart with a miniature wardrobe and a pithy personality -- they take him home, where his new brother George (Jonathan Lipnicki from "Jerry Maguire") gives him the cold shoulder and the family cat (voiced obnoxiously by Nathan Lane) tries to eat him.

Continue reading: Stuart Little Review