Fame (2009)

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

For those who don't know, FAME is a remake of the 1980 version and it completely lacks what made it good. The original FAME has believable characters and situations, memorable songs, and brilliant singers and actors. However, no one can act and the songs are poor updates of the original. Even if you judge this movie on it's own basis, you're still going to find it awful. The acting sucks, the music is forgettable, and the direction is so bland that nobody even knows what to do half of the time. FAME was clearly trying to please the High School Musical crowd when it was released and it completely failed. This is kid version of a serious and realistic musical. FAME was about understanding, trying to find yourself in high school, and the consequences for following the path to fame. Now every sense of seriousness and realism is taken for terrible dances and awful musical sequences. This is a complete butcher of what the original FAME was. PLEASE DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND WATCH THE 1980 VERSION INSTEAD!

I was extremely looking forward to seeing this film however it is probably in my top ten worst films I've ever screen.1) I've never seen characters so badly developed, there's not only too many stories going on (which are all idiotic and I couldn't care less about any of them) but there's just too many people in this. I didn't know one name by the end. 2) They don't even sing "Fame" in the film! How disgraceful is that! It is only played in the credits which by that time I was running out of the room. 3) The pure lack of musical numbers is just mind-blowing. The ones that are there are poorly choreography (except the final performance which is the only reason this gets 1 star) and the singing is only mediocre. 4) The acting! It's really bad from beginning to end.Please do not pay to watch this film, rent it or watch it on TV - DO NOT BUY IT! It's very, very bad.

This remake was doomed from the start. The original film is iconic- even those who haven't seen the film know the theme tune. How can you compete with Irene Cara's original version? The r'n'b remix that this new film uses is terrible. But it's not just the title song that this remake has to compete with. The remake cannot free itself from the shadow of the original.Remaking Fame was not an entirely ridiculous idea. The original was thirty years ago and with the advent of Facebook, YouTube, and all those X-factor type shows, shortcutting your way to fame seems like a real possibility. And the cast actually look like they could be at high school, instead of the original cast that looked like they could have children who were at high school. There was a lot of potential for the director and writer to make a film that didn't try to compete with the original, but was an alternative that could be equally enjoyable.This film focuses more on dance and music than it does acting (perhaps because the actors can't really act). We get the same types of characters that we got for the original, however in the original these characters didn't come off as stereotypes. They were fleshed out and I was gripped by their problems, which were far darker than this film. As a viewer you actually wanted to make an effort to follow all these different characters in the original. However in this film the characters are so cardboard and the situations so clichéd that it's easy to forget who they are. It makes the lyric in the title song: "baby, remember my name", amusingly ironic. For the time that the characters are on screen, most of them are annoying. The naive/stupid 'plain' girl and her wet boy-band reject love interest are particular standouts in that department.As in the original, the film marks each year of the characters' time at the school, starting from auditions to graduation, however the time gaps seem to be massive. Random characters and relationships will just come out of nowhere, and so the characters never really progress. Instead it's like amnesia occurs at the end of each year.You can tell which of the songs are from the original film because the other ones are so bland. There is a nice version of Out Here on My Own, although it doesn't compare with Irene Cara's version either in the musical or dramatic sense. Cara's character (Coco) was the showoff star who was actually more vulnerable than she appeared to be. In the new version, she's a bit of a loner- the equivalent of Bruno in the original.But what about those who haven't seen the original? You'll probably be even more lost than the ones who've seen the original and know what to expect. Because the film is character-driven, the lack of interesting characters will make the film seem infinitely long. It attempts to be gritty by adding in a few swear words and 'serious' issues but this just makes it worse. If it was really cheesy at least it might have been entertaining.In short, this film has nothing to say about fame, current or otherwise.

At the time of its release, the original FAME (1980) was out of my demographic - I was too young to appreciate the tribulations of 70's high schoolers balancing schoolwork and performing arts and aiming for their fifteen minutes. In this tepid remake - now I'm too old to care. Kevin Tancharoen helms this rushed production that flits through so many story lines and characters at the New York School of Performing Arts, it implodes with two-dimensionality.Main character is young, nominally talented Jenny (Kay Panabaker, who looks like she's still waiting for her period), so inept at the performing arts, we wonder how she ever got in. We discover later she didn't even sleep her way in, so which authority did her rich daddy pay off? Other characters orbit, trying to cover every angle on parent-kid tropes: the talented kid stultified by parents; the parents trying to channel their kid's talent in another direction; the kid hiding their scholarship from parents...We see the cons, the competitiveness, the crises, as film scrambles through Audition Day, Freshman Year, Sophomore Year, ultimately failing to convey the tedium of practice, the long hours of dedication, the added burden of schoolwork, the sacrifices de rigueur in becoming any kind of artist. Well, I guess all these annoying extroverted snots are just looking for "fame" - not art. As evidenced by the impromptu cafeteria jam which will leave you feeling dirty. Veteran cast (Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammar, Bebe Neuwirth) don't have much to do except pretend to be teachers, which Grammar of course, pulls off most eloquently - everything he says sounds didactic. After claiming the school is highly coveted, we wonder at the mediocrities who were turned away when tin-eared Jenny plods insensibly through a vocal rendition of Someone To Watch Over Me like a little girl who's never been touched by either a boy or her pedophile uncle. (People clamor to get into a school that accepts people like HER?) Then pretty-like-a-girl Marco (Asher Book) gets up and sings it like he's remembering being touched by a boy or his pedophile uncle. Compare their renditions to that of Jean Louisa Kelly (and whoever performed her singing voice) in MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS - an amazing performance sung with the truest emotion of desperately needing a willy in her mouth. The annoying conceptual mistake all movies of this ilk make: "talent = fame." No. Talent simply equals talent. The vagaries of the industry denote either landing in the pathway to greatness or nibbling at the periphery. Talent helps, fershure, but is not the magic key to any door. And "holding onto your dreams" is no guarantee of success. Likewise, "letting go of your dreams" is no guarantee of failure. The Kids playfully harass one of their vocal teachers who proves her mettle at Karaoke (which, to my knowledge, proves nothing more than you're a douchebag), asking her why she didn't stick to being a vocalist. Whatever that means - remaining a starving musician, I guess. They infer that inherent talent guarantees success. Or at least fame. As long as you "hold onto your dreams." This demonstrable bull is so egregious that I let my dreams out of their titanium prison and told them if they wanted to get held so much they should seek therapy. The way the untalented character (Paul McGill) is castigated, movie is telling us that lack of talent equals futility in achieving fame. Also demonstrably untrue: Paris Hilton, The White House party-crashing Salahis, balloon boy's father, George W. Bush, Milli Vanilli, William Hung, Ed Wood, Rob Schneider, and most of the kids in this movie. Yet "hold onto your dreams" is shoved down our throats like a pedophile uncle's penis, not taking into account that Paul McGill's character was just told to let go of his dreams, being so untalented he is advised to become a teacher! Those who can't do, teach, right? But what if HE held onto his dream of being a dancer? Well, he already IS a dancer - just not a "famous" one. And fame is all that counts.Regrettably true. More people know the brainless Rush Limbaugh than the acute Stephen Jay Gould. There is more fame for the talentless winner of American Idol than for the talented writer of the song he sang. Most of us teachers and musicians and composers get tagged "wannabes" and "failed musicians" at some point in our lives if we're not famous enough for the insulter to know us outside of their jejune existence. What we are is "Failed FAMOUS Musicians" - through no one's fault (especially not ours, since - as FAME tells us - Talent=Fame, and we've always had the talent) we've failed to become well known enough for Jejune to appreciate who we are. The original 1980 theme song, Fame (performed by Irene Cara, written by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford) conveyed what it was all about - narcissism. "Give me time, I'll make you forget the rest / Don't you know who I am? / Remember my name! / I wanna live forever..."There's nothing in this film that captures that egotism. And the urgent disco stylings of Cara's version are completely ignored, in favor of two of this film's overactors (Naturi Naughton and Collins Pennie) performing a limp hip-hop rehash as an outro fadeout. Keep searching for your fifteen minutes, kids. Appearing in this film will just make you Failed Famous Actors...