I suppose it's a no-brainer, in this era of High School Musical and its arch and witty TV doppelganger Glee, that somebody would resurrect Fame after 30 years.
After all, kids still wanna live forever, and they still wanna learn how to fly.
And a no-brainer is what we got, a bad film that at times is sublimely cheesy.
I mean, Will & Grace's Megan Mullally as a voice coach? And she sings! (Her performance sounds exactly as you'd expect, like two balloons being rubbed together. Yes, I know she was in Broadway's Young Frankenstein, but -- hint -- that was a comedy).
Having heard a torch song murdered, an appreciative tear appears in music teacher Kelsey Grammer's eye and her students, blown away by the calibre of her vocals, demand to know why she'd give up her career to teach.
Only in a bizarro high school planet like this could the aforementioned Kelsey Grammer help an African-American girl named Denise (Naturi Naughton), hamstrung by the limitations of classical piano, get down with her bad self and become Beyonce-lite. Or drama teacher Charles Dutton could spend four years screaming at a surly homeboy named Malik (Collins Pennie) that -- "The theatre is a Church! We don't need angry people here!"
Besides Debbie Allen (in a cameo as the principal), this Fame shares with the old Fame the narrative shorthand of reducing the students to archetypes -- the mousy wannabe actress Jenny (Kay Panabaker), her lazily gifted singer boyfriend Marco (Asher Book), the wannabe filmmaker Neil (Paul Iacono), the wannabe music mixer Victor (Walter Perez) and the just-not-good-enough gay dancer (Paul McGill).
Yes, the only identifiable gay character in the movie is the one who just can't seem to "get" choreography.
It also shares the impromptu-dancin'-on-the tables/jam-session-in-the-cafeteria that happened all the time on the old show.
Boy, high school is way more fun than I remember.
Of course, a whole lot of pop culture -- not to mention something called hip-hop -- has emerged since the old Fame. So it is that the new one opens with a rapid-fire-edited audition montage that comes off like a mash-up of American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance and a Mentos commercial.
It thereafter settles into an episode of The O.C. with musical breaks. In almost mechanically equitable scripting, each character gets his or her petty drama en route to, in most cases, the big time.
Under the guise of an audition, Jenny gets the make sleazily put on her by a school alumnus who's become a Zac Efron-style teen star. Neil gets "taken" by a sleazy producer (welcome to Hollywood, kid).
And Malik has to hide from his mom the fact that he's been accepted at one of the most prestigious schools in the country (she thinks he's in public school), because she doesn't want to encourage any foolish notions of him becoming famous.
"Who put the idea in your head that you're special?" she shouts.
"You did!" he replies. Aww.
Under missed opportunities, file the fact that Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith in Frasier and Cheers) are both in this movie and don't have a scene together.
On the plus side, the choreography is good, as is the singing -- although it's hard to judge that for certain in the era of digital "tweaking."
(This film is rated PG)
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