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The four years in the lives of some students in one class, from their entrance audition to their graduation, at New York City's High School for the Performing Arts. Upon their entrance, the disparate group have a few things in common: they've got 'big dreams' and they 'want fame'.
There are enough hoary soap-operatic plottings for a thousand Gossip Girls (emotionally distant parents, almost-rapes, suicide attempts), yet Tancharoen individualizes each crisis so that no one character comes off as a mock-universal surrogate.
September 30, 2009
Film Freak Central
absolutely shameless in its sadistic trotting-out of every single rabbit in the tiny teen-pageant top hat.
Kevin Tancharoen's remake of "Fame" is a flat, lifeless experience that is missing the emotion required to get us involved with the characters and their situations.
Members of the class of '80 struggled to stay in school despite homelessness and crime; the greatest crisis in '09 finds a student's Sesame Street work schedule affecting her GPA.
The pageantry really is very nice, especially the dance numbers, but as soon as the music stops, so does Fame. It's not the worst remake ever made, it's not even really very bad, just stodgily, repressively mediocre.
I don't mind the cornball and I don't mind the clichés, but I just think that the thing has to be executed a little better than this.
September 28, 2009
Chicago Tribune
It's almost fatally modest. But it has a sweet spirit, and it offers only one true moment of inadvertent camp: a (lame) finale featuring an African dance routine completely at odds with all the white bread we've just been served.