Sela Ward has spent so much of the season suffering exquisitely as Lily Manning on Once and Again that it’s nice to see her enjoying herself a little bit in CBS’s romantic comedy Catch a Falling Star (9 p.m. Sunday on WFOR-Ch. 4, WPEC-Ch. 12). Alas, here the suffering is left up to us.
Ward plays a petulant Hollywood actress who storms off a set on location in New England after she catches her slick screenwriter fiance in a dalliance with her stand-in. She winds up in a small town, where she takes on her most challenging role — a regular gal — and befriends some locals, including the hearty waitress with some dreams (Rebecca Jenkins) and particularly the soft-spoken fella (John Slattery) trying to keep the struggling steel mill from going under. She comes to understand that the modest lifestyle embodied in this town is more “real” than her Hollywood theatrics.
Can you count the cliches in the preceding paragraph? Throw in some sloppy plotting and character motivations, as well as hackneyed scripting (He: “You got a certain big-city something-or-other, but not entirely! I like it!” She, after they’re smitten: “I’m lost without a script!”), and you have a production leavened only by Ward’s presence. Besides, Notting Hill did all this last year. Falling star? Ward doesn’t know the half of it.
– DAVID KRONKE Los Angeles Daily News
Tyra’s a doll
Life-Size, ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney offering (7 p.m. Sunday on WPLG-Ch. 10, WPBF-Ch. 25), is programmatic Disney piffle celebrating those twin Mouse House virtues of consumerism and sentiment.
Even a semi-novice actor like supermodel Tyra Banks is above a role like that of Eve, a Barbie-style doll come to life, much to the astonished chagrin of young Casey (Lindsay Lohan), who was hoping to resurrect her late mother instead. It gets worse, however, when her workaholic pop (Jere Burns, too intense for this kind of material) befriends the living doll.
Though she chirps merrily about being a role model for girls and having been an astronaut and policeman, Eve can’t even type (the film does allow, at least, that this is something of a flaw). She’s an ace, however, on clothes and makeup.
There’s also a queasy subtext about office sexual politics that’ll no doubt thrill the kids. And this being a Disney production, of course, there are the requisite shopping and dancing montages. And when Eve asks about water coming from Casey’s eyes, it’s a sure bet she’ll be tearing up before the end of the movie, as well. Audiences, however, will likely be spared from the same fate.
– DAVID KRONKE Los Angeles Daily News
Tara’s an actress
Who would have guessed that figure skater Tara Lipinski is a pretty good little actress? She acquits herself well in her first role, in the comedy Ice Angel (8 p.m. Sunday on the Fox Family Channel).
Essentially a gender-switching version of Here Comes Mr. Jordan and the remake Heaven Can Wait, Ice Angel centers on a young male hockey player who is mistakenly taken up to heaven well before his time and sent back in the body of a female figure skater who just died.
Nicholle Tom (The Nanny) carries the cute movie with some clever and convincing moments as a man in a woman’s body. Lipinski shines as the figure skater’s teammate and rival, who helps her strange-behaving friend regain her form as she heads for the Olympics.
Nancy Kerrigan also does well in a smaller but significant role, while other skaters, including Elvis Stojko and Josee Chouinard, make cameo appearances, and former skaters-turned-announcers Peter Carruthers and Rosalynn Sumners get screen time as well.
– SCOTT HETTRICK Entertainment News Service
