Fame

When you remake a classic and people like it, your movie is an homage that honors the original. When your remake turns into this week's Fame, it's a rip-off, you are a heretic, and people who love the original will be arriving at your home with pitchforks. Good luck, director Kevin Tancharoen. You might want to move to a new house, in a different neighborhood, on a different continent (may I suggest Antarctica?).

Where do we start? Fame features several young actors who are freshmen at a nameless high school for the performing arts in New York City. All of the obvious stereotypes are represented. Jenny (Kay Panabaker) is the sweet girl next door who is very uptight, not sure she is going to make it and desperately in need of some life experience and maturity. Malik (Collins Pennie) is the tough kid from the wrong part of town who has had it rough and needs to channel his anger. Denise (Naturi Naughton) has been pushed by her overbearing father to become a classical pianist, but she wants to be the next Alicia Keys, not the next Sergei Rachmaninoff. Then, we have a bunch of other clichés too tedious to go into here (trust me, I am passing over them for your own good and my sanity).

As we watch these freshmen go through the trials and tribulations of life, will they emerge as graduating seniors on the verge of Fame?

Who will crack under the pressure?

Whose name will we remember, remember, remember?

After sitting through Fame, you might not want to remember the experience. Tancharoen and writer Allison Burnett (based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore) give the audience snapshots from a movie instead of a complete movie. They have to juggle too many storylines, so no one ever gets the attention it deserves, the depth of exploration that will give the audience a meaningful revelation nor a full picture of the character's life, challenges and victory (or defeat).

In Fame, we are left with a bunch of half developed scenes surrounded by musical interludes (and I feel bad for the acting kids in these musical interludes. When lunch breaks out into a jam session, the musicians get to play, the rappers get to rap, the dancers get to boogie and shake their booties. What can the actors do, recite Shakespearean soliloquies?) .

Tancharoen and Burnett also waste their extremely talented veteran ensemble. Kelsey Grammer is left to look sullen all of the time as he reviews the students playing the piano and lecture them about the relevance of Bach and Beethoven (they don't even rock me, Amadeus). Then, Tancharoen and Burnett avoid putting Grammer in any scenes with this Fame's dance instructor, Bebe Neuwirth!!!! Give me one tiny, minuscule, fleeting moment where Lilith and Frasier pass each other in the hall or something! Megan Mullally gets one decent scene as the vocal instructor who knows how to entertain, while Debbie Allen makes two brief, meaningless appearances in lame attempts to appeal to the original Fame lovers. It's a cheap, but ineffective attempt to win us over and it fails miserably, since the rest of the movie is so disappointing.

Naughton is a show stopper who will blow you away like Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls, but nothing can save us from the final act of blasphemy as our beloved theme song gets destroyed and converted into some sort of Destiny's Child remix. Somewhere, Irene Cara weeps.

Fame is rated PG for thematic material including teen drinking, a sexual situation and language.