Next month Lifetime will air a two-part mini-series about Coco Chanel's life, creatively titled Coco Chanel and starring Shirley MacLaine. Linda Stasi pens a review of it for today's New York Post and — what do you know? — she says it's boring, saturated with bad acting, and is generally laughably crappy. You know, like every other Lifetime original movie. She is immediately peeved by a disclaimer before the program that says the movie is "freely inspired by the truth":

They should have called it "freely uninspired" since, after three looong hours of dull, awful, embarrassing dialogue and bad acting, you'll feel that you may never get inspired by anything again.

And about that dialogue and bad acting:

One part is about the younger Chanel at the turn of the century, and everyone has thick accents. And then, every 20 minutes or so, there's an abrupt cut to 1954, where Shirley Chanel has no accent whatsoever.

In fact, the two Chanels seem to have no resemblance to one another other than they both like a well-cut suit.

The supporting actors are no help either:

The first part quickly jumps to Chanel and her lovers (played by Oliver Sitruk and Sagamore Stevenin), who are all as wooden as a dressmakers' dummies.

Hm. Maybe Lifetime wanted to practice butchering before the taping of the next season of Project Runway got under way. But did they have to choose Chanel?

'COCO' PUFF [NYP]