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COCAINE GODMOTHER: THE GRISELDA BLANCO STORY
January 20, 2018  | By David Bianculli

Lifetime, 8:00 p.m. ET

 

I’m not in the habit of pointing out Lifetime telemovies, but this one sounds truly unusual. It’s a biographical film about drug kingpin Griselda Blanco, a rare female power figure in a shady underworld of macho thugs. Griselda Blanca Restrepo was a Colombian drug lord for the Medellin cartel, a major player in the Miami cocaine scene of the 1970s. This Lifetime movie could just as easily been titled one of her other formidable nicknames: The Black Widow, for example, or the clunkier Queen of Narco-Trafficking. And Griselda, in this telling, is played by Catherine Zeta Jones, whose most recent TV role, other than when playing Olivia de Havillard in last year’s Feud: Bette vs. Joan, was her pre-Zorro role in TV’s miniseries version of Titanic. And that was in 1996 – the year before James Cameron’s big-screen version. So for a starring small-screen role by Jones, it’s been a while…

 
 
 
 
 
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