Kevin Tancharoen’s remake of “Fame” is a flat, lifeless experience that is missing the emotion required of a film that requires us to get involved with the characters and their situations. This is yet another remake where I have not seen the original source material, but I imagine since it’s a somewhat well-known film, it must have had a little more to make it memorable than this version did.
The story follows several students as they audition to get into a performing arts school. Only a select few make it in and from that point on, we are shown all of their hard work as they study and practice their specific crafts. However, everything is not as easy as that. There are problems that arise over their years at this school. Relationships form, some have trouble doing what they dream of doing, and some end up finding out that they want to do something completely different than what they originally intended.
The reason I don’t list any of the students in particular is that there are far too many to name, and none of which were the least bit memorable. To even begin listing their names, I would have to look them up on IMDB, which is just a testament to how forgettable they are. The film tries to encompass far too many characters in one film and it ends up not giving enough time to any one of them to make us care.
Another big reason that the characters are pretty forgettable is that the performances were just not that good. There are several unknowns playing all the students, but none of them leave a mark, or allow us to get emotionally involved. It’s not entirely their fault however. The screenplay has them following the typical school clichés, leaving little room for them to take control of the characters.
The worst of these clichés has a student’s father demanding that she continue classical piano instead of singing, while we sit back and wait for someone to confront the father about letting her follow her dream. Another has a girl trying to get a part on a show through another student she knows, only to find that he wants to take advantage of her. What was her first clue? Was it her coming on to her earlier than the scene called for, or the fact that he was videotaping the entire thing? It does not seem possible that she is this naive.
There are some well-known actors in this production as well, including Kelsey Grammer and Charles S. Dutton. Unfortunately, they are given far too little screentime (especially Grammer). Their scenes are the closest thing this film comes to when attempting to elicit an emotional response, but they too are trapped by their characters (the “caring teachers”) and are just not given very much to do otherwise.
The film feels incredibly rushed. It is split up into their four years at the school, but does it far too quickly. It felt as though there was no change during these years at all, except problems that force their way into the story. These are mainly the relationships that I mentioned earlier which end up finding no place in the story at all and only goes towards adding superfluous scenes to the film.
The film starts out with a ten-minute montage of auditions from the potential students, the most amusing of which is when one student auditions with a scene from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The rest of the film feels like it merely continues these auditions by including several random song and dance numbers and taking the emotion out of them. This is amusing because one of the lessons the singing teacher gives to a student involves knowing exactly what you’re singing about to allow others to get something out of it.
The last big production number is a particularly big mess in which the filmmakers try to combine several different forms of the performing arts that the students have worked on over the years including ballet, tribal dancing, orchestra, and gospel choir. Perhaps the original film got it right and this is just a dreadful remake. A story like this could certainly work, but you absolutely must have the basic emotional foundation to even have a prayer.
2/4 stars.