The film revolves around those four years in the life of some students in a semester. The film explores that student experience all the way through testing their entry to graduation, at New York City's Performing Arts High School. It is a youth experience that embodies the path of these young people and their aspirations.
There are enough hoary soap-operatic plottings for a thousand Gossip Girls (emotionally distant parents, almost-rapes, suicide attempts), yet Tancharoen individualizes each crisis so that no one character comes off as a mock-universal surrogate.
Film Freak Central
September 28, 2010
absolutely shameless in its sadistic trotting-out of every single rabbit in the tiny teen-pageant top hat.
Kevin Tancharoen's remake of "Fame" is a flat, lifeless experience that is missing the emotion required to get us involved with the characters and their situations.
Members of the class of '80 struggled to stay in school despite homelessness and crime; the greatest crisis in '09 finds a student's Sesame Street work schedule affecting her GPA.
The pageantry really is very nice, especially the dance numbers, but as soon as the music stops, so does Fame. It's not the worst remake ever made, it's not even really very bad, just stodgily, repressively mediocre.
I don't mind the cornball and I don't mind the clichés, but I just think that the thing has to be executed a little better than this.
Chicago Tribune
September 25, 2009
It's almost fatally modest. But it has a sweet spirit, and it offers only one true moment of inadvertent camp: a (lame) finale featuring an African dance routine completely at odds with all the white bread we've just been served.
