Fame: Pretty Please Don't Live Forever

My fiancé picked on me for this last night because he just knows me way to well, and I tried to resist the urge to do this, but in the end the blogger in me won out, so here you are.

Last night, a quaint little gaggle of gays made our way down to the River East AMC downtown to watch the newest in the long tradition of movies that somehow manages to appeal to gay men without actually advertising to us: Fame. Fame is a remake of an 80's movie, which should have been enough to make us weary of the flick, but it featured dancers, singers, artists and disenfranchised high school kids that have found a magical home. And that is just about all we gays need to be drawn to a flick.

I don't think I need to make this very long. The movie was bad. It wasn't the most god-awful thing I've seen, but it found a way to crawl up my list of movies to watch when I need to self-induce a coma. There is no plot. Whatsoever. None. There are simply characters, and only a couple of them with real depth, and even fewer of them played with any sense of credibility, which is oddly ironic in a movie mostly about young people struggling to be actors.

The stories being told throughout the film are mostly disjointed, and it seems more like a mistake than a planned effort if any one of the stories interacts with another or if a story arched for more than 20 minutes. The movie is presented in four parts, one for each year of high school, and one would naturally expect to see some development of the characters and their talents over those four years. Instead, we're shown perfect or almost perfect performers as freshmen who do not develop their skills one iota nor do they develop their personalities.

Even the "emotional" moments were laughable. One student attempts to commit suicide (it wouldn't be a high school movie without someone trying to off themselves apparently…) which comes across as a terrible attempt at a cheap laugh more than an emotionally stringing moment. Oh, and apparently mothers in Iowa are perfectly fine with putting their gay as the day is long young 14-year-old sons up in a studio apartment in New York all by their lonesome just so they can study at a performing arts school… cause that makes sense. There are no other performing arts schools anywhere near Iowa...

Anyway, do yourself a favor and just don't see it. Seriously, don't bother. Unless you want to see Karen Walker not be Karen Walker. Or watch performances that are so overtly doctored up in a studio a Brittany Spears concert with Ashley Simpson opening would sound more realistic. If any of those sound good to you, please go see Fame. Otherwise, spare yourself.