DANIELLE STEELE'S FULL CIRCLE (1996) * Gluttonous schmaltz about characters so deranged that they live in San Francisco in the late 1980s and don't even go to the Grateful Dead shows in Oakland for New Year's, in fact they appear quite content to watch Times Square on tv and cook. Strangely there seems to be something missing. The good thing about these self-contained soap films is that they don't go on repeating themselves ad infinitum every weekday for decades. There are many bad things but ironically one is not how they touch base with serious issues in a superficial manner with bad actors and Danielle Steele lightning: too bright, muddied, and soft lens. Ok, that really is another bad thing but the faithful are taught not to be victims, to instead be survivors, and that heavy weight can be borne, and that's a better message than most. The heroine here can't find a decent relationship so she ends up throwing herself into her career-could pass for realism if you don't see it. Meanwhile all of the characters dress awful and try to elevate themselves as being less "yuppie" than others, while at the same time working themselves silly for the corporate machine and a nice apartment. Still there seems to be something missing. The most telling moment, both on the character and on Steele as a writer-admittedly watching this is the closest that I'll ever get to her writing- is that the protagonist judge considered herself inadequate to pass judgment on the one true romantic spark of her entire life, who had run off to take the world's problems head-on by becoming a terrorist. Almost entirely bereft of aesthetic quality, but not devoid of values. But who wants or needs to learn them from bad shows? You wish just once the attending doctor would turn out to have Frankensteinian designs, or the Zen fly-fishers would hook a Mako Shark out of the tributary, or the judge with the bad hair would link up with the radical to form the San Francisco Meinhof gang...oh, wait that's where the Patty Hearst story came from, wasn't it? "I've come full circle on a road paved with forgiveness." Lofty sentiments that wouldn't be betrayed by a few more roadside attractions.
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