Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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POLLY (NBC, Nov. 12, 7 p.m. EST). Will a batch of new songs and The Cosby Show's Keshia Knight Pulliam be able to improve on the old Disney film about an orphan with a cheery outlook? Don't be a Pollyanna...
Immediate Family touches all these bases lightly, like a gazelle on a home- run trot. Openhearted and canny, the film offers few answers, takes no sides. It paints the yups, Linda and Michael, as decent, attractive people. Their friends' kids may run wild in a toddler road show of Lord of the Flies, but the Spectors seem ideal parents-to-be. Yet they can't be biological parents. Every month Linda says, "I spend two weeks whacked out on fertility drugs, two weeks depressed that they don't work." In the bathroom, Michael opens a specimen jar, picks...
...which director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel, The Accused) observes with his usual handsome care. Close and Woods, more familiar playing high-powered candidates for psychosis, are laser-precise as the Spectors. They work hard at appearing comfortable in roles without edges. But the Spectors, who set the film's agenda, cede sympathy to Lucy, as the well-to-do in movies inevitably do to the poor-but-spunky...
...film's admirable trick is to shift the balance without opting for heroes and villains. Kevin Dillon, as Lucy's boyfriend, lists toward the loutish, but he's no jerk. And Masterson's fine, grace-noted performance is like the film: full of wit, skepticism and hope for compromises that won't ruin lives. This is a serious comedy that locates wry smiles in everyone's burdens and opportunities. The tears come...
...Left Foot, Brown's autobiography about his hard-won emergence as a painter and author, could be meat for good drama or the sap in a TV-movie treacle pudding. This Irish film is mostly meat. Knowing that the audience will embrace Christy, the filmmakers are free to make him as stubborn as he is courageous. For Christy everything begins with will: the will to be understood, to do well things he would not be thought able to do at all and, later, to be loved by the pretty doctor who would only admire and inspire...