The Week in Film: A defanged "Fame," a snubbed Pedro and the latest trailers

After watching the "gay exorcism" kid on Tyra, aren't you ready to turn off the TV and see what's going on at the movies? Heaven knows, I am!

The week's big opener is, of course, the remake of Fame, featuring a cast of talented youngsters that's way more shiny, happy and generally well-scrubbed than their grittier 1980 counterparts.

That would be OK if this new movie were a tenth as engaging or well-written as the first one, but alas, it ain't. Even the few standout musical numbers aren't rousing enough to put over the rest of this lead balloon. (Read AfterElton.com's review here.)

That we've gone from the New York City High School of Performing Arts apparently having but one gay student (yeah, right) in '80 to one exceedingly gay-vague dancer boy doesn't feel like all that much progress, either.

And how can you put Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth, the artists formerly known as Frasier and Lilith Crane, in the same movie without giving them a scene together? Blasphemy!

Also gracing screens is Surrogates, a sci-fi thriller that didn't seem too promising but which wound up being lots of fun. Bruce Willis is an FBI agent in a future that has everyone staying at home and living their life through synthetic "surrogates," who go out in the world and interact with everyone else's avatar.

Someone figures out a way to kill not only a surrogate but its human controller, and thus the chasing and the whodunit-ing begins. It's dopey fun.