Word: docudrama
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...School, is still a kid. "I am kind of two different people," he says. "Very serious and competitive in one world. And Josh in the other one." The film ensures that he is now a third person in a new world: the semifictional, wholly romantic hero of a movie docudrama. He is other people's idea of Josh: a child again, as imagined by writer-director Steve Zaillian and played, with a nice, otherworldly seriousness, by chess whiz Max Pomeranc, 8. Yet for Josh's mother, who learned chess from her small son and now teaches it at two schools...
...common to get riled over. This one, moreover, inoculates itself with a disclaimer at the outset: "A fictionalized account inspired by the public lives of Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy." None of which can entirely excuse this USA Network movie from responsibility for breaking new ground in docudrama shamelessness...
...brainchild of two intriguing newcomers to network TV: Oliver Stone, the director of JFK and Platoon, and Bruce Wagner, writer of a hallucinated comic strip in Details magazine on which the mini-series is based. A few minutes into this futuristic fantasy, and viewers numbed by TV's docudrama deluge will realize they've stumbled onto something special. A few more minutes, and a lot of them might be zapping off to Married . . . with Children. But those who fall for Wild Palms could fall hard: what we have here may be TV's next cult hit. Or at the very...
MARITAL SEPARATIONS, A FIRE AT WINDsor Castle and now CHARLES AND DIANA: UNHAPPILY EVER AFTER -- it has been a rough year for the royal family. ABC's new docudrama (Dec. 13) starts with the 1981 royal wedding and goes downhill from there. Its sympathies are plain: Diana is the down-to-earth outsider forced to endure a stuffy new life-style (when she pops into the palace kitchen for orange juice, the staff is horrified). Charles is merely a wuss; the real heavies are his priggish parents, forever sniffing about royal propriety. Despite the oversimplification, this TV movie is surprisingly...
...They have a taste for it. The distinction between actual death and special effects gets blurry in this culture. It thins to vanishing. Reality and unreality become ugly, interchangeable kicks. Perhaps if Harris had been spared, he might, like Audie Murphy, have been hired to play himself in the docudrama...