The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life In Not A Fairytale (2006/Lifetime DVD)/Lifetime Gold Collection (w/Ambulance
Girl…)/The Love You Save
(2011/Image DVD)/Moms To The Rescue
(Lifetime DVD set)/What Color Is Love?
(2008/Lifetime DVD)
Picture: C Sound: C/C/C/C/C+ Extras: D Telefilms: C-/C-/C-/C-/C
Now for a
glut of would-be dramas from Lifetime, plus one that has more than a few
interesting common denominators with them…
The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life
In Not A Fairytale
(2006) has the real life reality TV singing contest winner’s alleged story of
triumph over poverty and rejection as a drama telefilm that is likely more true
than we would want to believe and makes you glad Miss Barrino survived the hell
she has gone through in her life, but even with Loretta Divine and Viola Davis
in the cast, this is sadly rather formulaic and sometimes awkward. That does not trivialize the subject matter,
but does make it problematic throughout and all these years later, one wonders
if she is still OK.
The Lifetime Gold Collection is the first of two collections
of telefilms that offer star turns in only semi-memorable works. Kathy Bates is here in Ambulance Girl, Thora Birch (before all her Horror genre works) in Homeless To Harvard, Beau Bridges and
Blythe Danner on We Were The Mulvaneys
and Sarah Chalke in Why I Wore Lipstick
To My Mastectomy. All try to deal
with serious subject matter and the name stars make these curios, but they are
still on the rather safe side and just showing what happened passively or
ineffectively does not make them good telefilms. Thus, these are for the very curious only and
I wanted to like them more, but just could not.
Robin
Givens plays a variation of,,, Robin Givens in The Love You Save, another One Village production in the Tyler
Perry mode with all the actors on stage acting out the story of an independent
woman/snob (guess who) now facing life changes and a past that will come back
to remind her of what life is really about.
Except for an emphasis on faith and African American life (limited as
the scope presented might be) and could easily fit on Lifetime. Unfortunately, it seems like a lifetime
watching all 89 minutes of this odd bore.
Moms To The Rescue is the other Lifetime DVD set
here and includes Taken From Me: The
Tiffany Rubin Story (which we already reviewed elsewhere on this site) with
Taraji P. Henson as a mother facing sexism, racism and financial discrimination
when her husband essentially kidnaps her daughter and takes her to another
country and is the most watchable of the four telefilms here. Shelly Long shows up in the silly Honeymoon With Mom (call Dr. Freud) and
we get the two “Mom” titles in Mom, Dad
& Her and Mom At Sixteen
about odd circumstances holding a family together. Very melodramatic and not memorable, this set
is for fans only.
Finally
we have Gary Harvey’s What
Color Is Love? About a young sports groupie who gets involved with a
basketball star; she Caucasian and he African American even having a
child. However, it all goes bad and they
land up in court over that child. This
was made in Canada and is not quite as condescending as the usual Lifetime
fare, but yet I still thought it did not go far enough in telling us its true
story and missing plenty of issues in its too-short 82 minutes.
Most of
the titles are presented in anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 framing, though a
few of the Lifetimes (like Barrino) is 1.33 X 1. Despite that, they are all surprisingly on
the soft side (Taken From Me was a
little better than most) and I ultimately found their playback performance
disappointing. The lossy Dolby Digital
2.0 Stereo on al the titles seem second-generation or just plain weak, save Color which sounded like a recent
recording. There are no extras in any of
these releases save a flat Photo Gallery on Save.
- Nicholas Sheffo