JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The remake makes you want to run out and buy a DVD of the 1980 movie.

I did not know I was a fan of the 1980 Alan Parker movie Fame until we saw the remake which opened yesterday in Metro Manila theatres. Last year I watched Mamma Mia! with mounting horror; this is a movie which makes Mamma Mia! look like a masterpiece. I can say in all certainty that High School Musical is a far better movie than this one, and I haven’t even seen High School Musical.

The opening scenes in which the characters audition for places at the New York High School of Performing Arts tells you everything you need to know about this remake: montage, montage, montage. This is not a movie, it’s not even an extended music video; it’s nearly two hours of the dullest, most unimaginative montages ever committed to celluloid. At first I blamed the director who clearly has no idea how to tell a story, then Bert pointed out a more basic problem: There is no story. There are no real conflicts. Ay, they forgot to hire a screenwriter!

Sitting through the lifeless musical numbers and the boring songs, I realized that I remember not just one or two but six of the songs from the original movie. A musical rises and falls on its songs; this one jettisoned the memorable songs and replaced them with tunes you can’t even remember while you’re hearing them. They kept “Out Here On My Own” and the title track, but removed everything else. No “Is It Okay If I Call You Mine?” or “Dogs In The Yard”. That song in the cafeteria, “Hot Lunch Jam”? It worked because it felt like a real jam—spontaneous, silly, with references to food because duh, they’re in the cafeteria. They took it out. The gospel number, “Never Alone”? They kept the gospel choir, but forgot the song. The now-classic graduation song, “I Sing The Body Electric”? Gone, replaced with something that won’t even make it as the finale on American Idol.

Then I realized that this is not a remake of Alan Parker’s Fame. This is a remake of Auraeus Solito’s Pisay, except that Pisay has ten times the energy and rhythm of this movie…and it’s not even a musical. You have an emotional connection with the characters of Pisay: you root for those kids. In Fame when someone tries to leap onto the train tracks I heard myself shouting, “Jump!” At the very least the kids in Pisay come across as intelligent. The characters in Fame cannot convince the audience that they have talent.

Perhaps the worst thing about this Fame remake—there are so many candidates, I cannot say conclusively which is the worst—is that no one seems particularly interested in cultivating their talent abilities. They’re supposed to be in a highly-competitive high-pressure environment where only the finest survive, and no one so much as worries about their grades. There is no struggle to master their craft. No one is that concerned about graduating. However, they’re all obsessed with becoming famous NOW.

This, I think, is a reflection of the times we live in. Thirty years ago, when Irene Cara was singing “Out Here On My Own”, famous people were famous for doing something. They could break your heart with their singing, or defy gravity when they danced, or sum up the human experience with a line reading. Talent meant something. (True, there have always been useless celebrities, but they were not as visible or influential as they are now.) Today people are famous for being famous. They don’t have to work that hard, they just have to go viral. The audience doesn’t have to admire them, they only have to think, “Hey, I can do that, too.” When anyone can be famous, fame is cheap. Hence this pointless remake.

Even the poster is all wrong. It looks like the poster for Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, only Fame is the real horror.