Jonathan Storm | An unsurprising, gentle movie from Hallmark folks

"I don't want to love anybody anymore, and I don't want anybody to love me," says the 12-year-old orphan girl.

Honey, if you don't know that's about as perfect as it gets for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, you haven't been keeping up with the series' first 230 presentations.

A fine kid actress named Jodelle Ferland, and a couple of veterans you might have heard of, Sissy Spacek and Alfre Woodard, star in tomorrow's

Pictures of Hollis Woods

, at 9 p.m. on CBS3. (It may start late because of football overruns.)

The sweet and predictable movie is based on Patricia Reilly Giff's story that was one of five 2003 Newbery Honor Books named by children's librarians. It also won a Christopher Award for "affirming the highest values of the human spirit."

The Hallmark folks started dancing a jig when they heard about this one. That they were able to sign Spacek, Woodard and Judith Ivey, in a small role, is a tribute to the movie's gentle emotionalism, the fact that it deals with both foster children and Alzheimer's disease, and, perhaps, and less wondrously, to the dearth of decent roles for older actresses.

Ferland resembles a younger Kristen Kreuk (Lana Lang on

Smallville

). They're both from British Columbia, where half the stuff on TV, including this movie, is filmed. Canadian scenery, coastal and woodland, adds appreciably to the film.

There's lots of driving and hiking to the syrupy music of Van Dyke Parks, who has come about as far from his days with the Byrds and the Beach Boys as Spacek has since playing Carrie, the anti-prom queen.

Now, her character's starting down the road to dementia when a little foster girl shows up with a big scar on her head. What could the mystery be?

Of course we'll find out, as the show flashes back to the summer she spent with a family in a woodland cabin with no Internet, not even a phone.

Hallmark, specialists in TV for the whole family, would love every house to be like that. As it is, you'll probably have to put the kids in restraints to make them sit still for something they might even like.

Or, you could shoo them to the basement to play BioShock or Assassin's Creed, while you revel quietly in the kind of good TV they had before anybody ever heard of Donald Trump or Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Television

Pictures of Hollis Woods

9 p.m. tomorrow on CBS3