Fame (2009)

There are special categories of films in my mind. There are the ones which have a profound impact on your life, that make you question the day to day mundanity of your life in general. Some have a plot so absorbing, occasionally I get to the end and realise I don't even remember any of the characters' names. Others make me question my political and social opinions enough to warrant looking into issues and reassessing them.

Some are so bland and soulless that despite watching it twice, I can barely remember what happened in it. Fame will forever hold a special place in my heart, for one reason alone: When it had the visual montage of the main characters at the end in lieu of the traditional credit roll, I didn't even remember one of them being in the movie. Like, at all. I remember the costume she was wearing from an earlier scene which lasted all of 2 minutes, but I just couldn't for the life of me remember her even being in the 'story', at any point.

That's a special kind of special, in my book.

So, for anyone who's unfamiliar with the original Fame, the story is set in a school for performing arts in New York City. It followed a rag tag group of students through their auditions and their 3 years of education there, and was a relatively good coming-of-age story with all of the inspirational archetypes one would expect from such fodder. It was good, and the characters grew on you as they developed through their lives, becoming more rounded as they went and developing relationships with each other that varied from touching to heartbreaking, infuriating to adorable.

So, some choreographer decided to do a remake of the film, for whatever reason. I'm not sure what that reason was, since the original version might be a bit dated but is still as relevant as it was on it's original release, but that's besides the point.

The differences between the 1980 and 2009 versions of this are pretty noticeable. For a start, there's no story in the remake, for some reason. I'm not sure why they decided to skip that bit, since it seemed like a fairly large omission, but that was the route they took.

You have dancing girl, pianist girl, acting girl, singing girl, rapper slash actor guy, music guy, dancing gay and the teachers who actually managed to be played by a decent cast including Kelsey Grammar and Bebe Neuworth. Oh, and the fat one from Will & Grace.

The scenes involving the students are spread so thin that you don't really get to know them, which is the only way a movie like this works. They appear sporadically, there's a few vague romantic stories threaded in there, some dance routines and what I'm sure are meant to be rousing speeches of inspiration from the faculty, but it's more like a montage from a reality TV show. You just end up not giving a crap about any of them. When one of them tries to throw himself in front of a train, I was wondering more about which character it was in the first place. I think it was dancing gay, but it could have easily been a random tertiary character thrown in for dramatic effect.

I wonder why this guy even bothered trying to make a film, it's just beyond my grasp. Apparently he is the one who inflicted The Pussycat Dolls on the world, somehow, and they get him in to make an actual film based on that? Would you let Uwe Boll make... oh, wait. They keep letting Uwe Boll make tonnes of shit, I forget.

I feel sorry for the kids in the film, more than anything. They're never going to work again. As shit as the directing might have been, and the script, at the end of the day it's the actors who get the blame when it comes to the end. Their lack of charisma and charm just compounds the existing weaknesses of the film, and they just come across as pathetic and weak characters, when they're meant to be aspirational.

Still, I can't help but feel that I've caught a glimpse of the future of mainstream cinema - movies which are almost ethereal in nature, so lacking in substance that it has to make up for it in glitz and over-the-top glamour. Replacing story for routines, and characterisation for musical numbers.

Or maybe I'm just reading it wrong, maybe the students here are meant to be caricatures of teenagers who dream of fame and fortune because they don't have anything else going for them, so they live in perpetual adulation of those around them in the vain hope that it will be reciprocated. Maybe it's just trapped wind, fucked if I know.

All in all, it's hard to form an opinion on Fame, because it's like trying to form an opinion on blue, or irony, or sour. There's nothing but a concept to assess, and no substance to look at and appreciate or despise