Average Rating: 4.4/10
Reviews Counted: 114
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 86
Fame is ultimately undone by its choppy editing, its incomplete characterizations, and its apparent desire to appeal to the High School Musical generation.
Average Rating: 4.7/10
Critic Reviews: 28
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 19
Fame is ultimately undone by its choppy editing, its incomplete characterizations, and its apparent desire to appeal to the High School Musical generation.
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Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 193,341
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This remake of the '80s classic focuses on a group of young students attending a high school for the performing arts. Classmates study various aspects of performance, from dance to songwriting to acting, all of them hoping for the chance to one day become stars. Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullally, and Bebe Neuwirth portray the instructors, with a host of newcomers toplining the production as the students. ~ Cammila Albertson, Rovi
PG, 1 hr. 47 min.
Sep 25, 2009 Wide
Jan 12, 2010
$22.4M
MGM
All Critics (116) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (29) | Rotten (86) | DVD (7)
The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or-inconceivably for a theatrical milieu-no gay students.
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.
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.
There are six new songs in the remake, but not one makes any impact, or is likely to end up as the ring tone of 2010.
First-time filmmaker Kevin Tancharoen struggles to flesh out the 10 characters we meet during their freshman year at PA.
The production numbers are great, sometimes jaw-droppingly so.
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.
Fails to make a significant mark.
absolutely shameless in its sadistic trotting-out of every single rabbit in the tiny teen-pageant top hat.
Grab the soundtrack, which highlights the great voices amongst the cast, and enjoy the best bits of the film through your iPod.
Fame! 2009 is destined to become famous for all the wrong reasons.
It's as if the franchise was remade as a Pepsi commercial.
The fragmented narrative of high school kids pursuing their dreams (job security) has just barely more feel and understanding of what it's like to be young than 17 Again .
Remember the theme song? "I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry . . . Fame/I'm gonna live forever/Baby, remember my name." Sadly, none of that applies to this hollow, impersonal movie.
Everything is predictable, which is to the detriment of the mostly fine, young talent that appears in this ineffective retread.
This remake of Alan Parker's 1980 musical follows a rainbow coalition of sketchily characterised teenagers.
Its lack of melodrama and shock value make it all the more refreshing. Consider this film a grittier, inner city cousin of HSM and that's no back handed compliment
A little too scrubbed and sanitized, with the sharper realities of showbiz sanded down to a PG level.
a totally unoriginal and unnecessary remake that runs far, far away from anything edgy, controversial or interesting.
Thing is, to live forever would mean the eventual re-remake of Fame. And that won't do.
... no worse than the original, but that's plenty bad enough.
The script doesn't earn the C average students must maintain for continued enrollment in their performing arts school.
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.
I wasn't a huge fan of the original film but I did enjoy the TV series that came after. This remake of the film is hugely pointless because it adds nothing to the original. It does have good scenes though but unfortunately they always seem to be undone by what happens next. The second half of the film seems so
January 23, 2012Super Reviewer
I think that when a film is remade, the original is somehow labeled "ideal". Here's what I liked: the updated dance numbers. I might be crazy, but when I watch a musical, I want something fantastical. Shiny and flashy. The original... eh. The remake, yeah! And I liked that one kid actually wanting to kill himself. Much
November 25, 2010
Super Reviewer
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