Review: Live Forever? This “Fame” is Dead On Arrival

Wow, what a pointless remake.

I’m sitting here wracking my brain, trying to understand what could have possibly motivated the folks who remade the 1980 movie Fame.

Any updating they did was purely superficial. On the contrary, the original was far grittier, just as inclusive (if not more so, as I’ll explain in a minute), and gave you a much better sense of the emotional cost to a life in the arts.

And if the point was just to eschew reality and make an entertaining fantasy version of a school for the arts – a sort of High School Musical for older teens -- well, the 1980s Fame series was far more entertaining than this current movie too.

The only possible motivation I can see is money. But as all the instructors at the school in the movie say again and again, art must be “truthful” and “authentic” or there’s absolutely no point in doing it.

Why did the producers have these characters say these things when they obviously don’t believe it themselves?

Then there’s the movie’s gay character – or lack thereof.

Actor Paul McGill as "Kevin"

Yesterday, AfterElton.com broke the story of how one of the characters, Kevin, was originally written as gay, but then the scene that established him as gay was cut, because the director felt it was too “campy” and inauthentic. The director told us he thought it was still “clearly obvious” that the character was gay anyway.

I have no idea what the behind-the-scenes story is here – if the real reason the character was de-gayed was to make the film more “family-friendly,” or if, as the director says, the scene just didn’t work as shot.

Here’s what I know:

There’s nothing overt to indicate that the character is gay.

There is nothing subtle that indicated to me that he’s gay, except that at one point, he gets a little excited about a graduation costume.

Worse, very early on in the movie, there’s a sequence with a very effeminate kid – one of the talentless wannabees that auditions for the school – that’s played for laughs, and his queeniness is part of the joke.

But none of this is the point.