Review: 'Fame'
Plot: Talented teens try to make it, yet again, at New York's arts high school. Rated PG
Bottom line: Stay home and watch real high-school creativity on Fox's "Glee."
Cast: Newcomers who play 14-18 but look 25, plus star cameos as teachers.
Length: 1:47
'Fame' lives again, but this one goes on forever
Photo credit: MGM, 2009 | Kevin (Paul McGill, center) auditions for dance instructor Lynn Kraft (Bebe Neuwirth) in "Fame."
Videos
Trailer: Fame
Galleries
Scenes from 'Fame'
The attempt to live forever may finally have stuck a stake in the ambition of "Fame." After Alan Parker's 1980 hit movie, which won Oscars for the score and the gonna-live-forever title song, the tale of hopeful kids at the New York High School of the Performing Arts has dwindled into an '80s TV series and at least three way-Off-Broadway touring shows.
Now we have a big, bland and bogus clone of a movie update, which runs a half-hour less than the original and only feels like forever. The remake has the same general plot outline and the steadying presence of Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Mullally, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer and Debbie Allen as supportive faculty.
But the kids look awfully mature for high school. And, though there are halfhearted efforts to acknowledge the digital generation, these are teens without sex, drugs or more than a wink of gayness. All they care about is getting a recording contract, getting a movie deal, getting - you know - famous.
Whatever the moviemakers care about, it isn't what we used to define as reality. The set for the update is not the modern LaGuardia Performing Arts High School behind Lincoln Center. Instead, they filmed in the old Times Square building that hasn't been used for performing arts since 1984 - and, of course, in L.A. The choreography is tarted-up and the new songs are mostly hip-hop generics.
Most upsetting is the attitude toward the arts, dismissed as prisons from which creative children must escape to find their real selves in pop. Now that the entire world is a talent contest, the competition theme feels even more old and desperate than the kids.
