Fame defamed

It seems the timing for this couldn't be more ideal. We're currently awash in overexuberant praise for the likes of Patrick Swayze and John Hughes, two master purveyors of teen schmaltz. So what better time to release a remake of FAME, a movie about a bunch of bright but troubled students at a performing arts high school? After all. I've long considered FAME a kind of John Hughes movie, even though it was made years before Hughes made his first film.

But if the timing for this new FAME is perfect, the execution is decidedly not. Thanks to bad writing, stick- figure characters, and indifferent musical numbers, FAME 2009 is like a bad audition. You just want to say, "NEXT!" and be done with it.

The original FAME was no gem but what it lacked in style it made up for with a lot of heart. Each of the main characters, stereotypes though they might have been, got a chance to unburden their heart and reveal their true (or truer) selves. Thus, a gay kid could gingerly step out of the closet, a repressed Jewish girl could escape into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a desperate Puerto Rican could eventually learn how to re-define himself in the wake of Freddie Prinz's suicide. These character studies may have seemed generic and obvious but they also allowed for some emotional resonance. They were more than just performers - they were human beings with personal struggles beyond the stage.

What's remarkable about the remake is that none of its characters is allowed enough depth to register emotionally. The student with the strongest back story is a serious-minded black girl who's studied cello all her life but desperately wants to sing hip-hop. When her conservative father forbids it, the potential for dramatic fireworks is set. But the dad is so ridiculously overbearing, and so comically overwritten, that any real tension dissipates quickly.

More ill-conceived characterizations crop up with our main "couple:" the sweet-voiced hunk and his slightly insecure girlfriend. For starters, since her character can't really act and sings like she's still in grade school, it makes no sense that she would have ever made it through the gruelling audition process for this supposedly exclusive performing arts school. But even that makes more sense than the phony arguments these two get into so as to justify their breaking up. The course of their relationship is so arbitrary it can only engender eye- rolling in the audience.

The other characters are so sketchily drawn that they make almost no impression. When one of them is on the verge of committing suicide by stepping in front of a subway train, you realize the poverty of the script - because even THAT has no emotional impact.

None of this would have ultimately mattered, I suppose, if the musical numbers were out of this world. As Broadway has demonstrated time and time again, a lot of flaws can be covered up by rousing performances and a spectacular musical score. And this is what's most puzzling about the FAME remake. The songs don't soar and the dances don't fly. You'd think that a movie about lives dedicated to the stage would be able to do something more theatrical and inspiring than the glum retreads we get. (Look at the first twenty minutes of MOULIN ROUGE for a reminder of what a truly creative mind can do with song and dance.)

The original FAME came out the year before MTV even hit the airwaves. And yet, despite almost thirty years of MTV videos to enrich one's visual imagination, the filmmakers behind the remake were unable to come up with anything to rival the exuberance of the original's dancing-in-the- streets scene. That may have been corny but at least it was full of life.

The chorus of the title song proclaims:

I'M GONNA LIVE FOREVER,
BABY REMEMBER MY NAME
REMEMBER
REMEMBER
REMEMBER
REMEMBER

I'm afraid the only remembering going on will be of FAME circa 1980. The later incarnation is best forgotten ... and soon.