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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

New kids come to audition for New York City High School of Performing Arts. Leroy Johnson is a tough kid dragged to help a girl audition but he gets picked instead. Bruno Martelli is more interested in modern music. Doris Finsecker is shy pushed by her mother. Lisa Monroe is a dancer since childhood but finds herself falling behind. Coco Hernandez (Irene Cara) is confident at everything. Montgomery MacNeil is gay. The movie follows these kids and their teachers over the next 4 years.The beauty of this are the various unknown actors. The drawback is also the same thing which suffers from a lack of focus on a specific character. The numbers of characters are so many and the time spent is so vast. It becomes a series of disjointed vignettes. It does get into the foreign world of the performing arts and some pretty interesting dramatic aspects. Gene Anthony Ray is electric in his audition scene. There are some great memorable big energetic dance sequences like the cafeteria and on the street. They have 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show'. Some characters are inevitably more interesting than others which is different for every viewer. It is simply a bit too scattered.

I really liked this movie! It could have been a really cheesy movie about kids wanting to make it big in show business so they learn all about it at a special school. That would have been disastrous. What makes FAME work is that you do have aspiring actors, singers, and dancers wanting success and dreaming big but they are given a hard wake up call about the rigerous demands that fame costs. Plus, what sets this film up is the fact that real life delimas hit these kids SUPER HARD. You don't get milk toast problems like bad acne or boyfriend trouble, you got exploitation, abortion, illiteracy and a genuine fear of being inadequate. There is not a single bad performance in this movie and that is saying something considering the unknown, at the time cast. As Debbie Allen said in the this movie and in the TV show, "You got big dreams, you want fame, well fame costs! And right here is where you start paying, in sweat!."

I don't know if I would class this as a musical, but it is certainly a teen drama with some songs and performances in it that I wanted to try, from BAFTA nominated director Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning). Basically the story is set at New York High School for the Performing Arts, where the newest students are training to achieve their goals to become great singers, actors and performers. The four students that the film mainly follows are black wannabe starlet Coco Hernandez (Golden Globe nominated Irene Cara), shy and less than confident Doris Finsecker (Maureen Teefy), gay and sensitive Montgomery MacNeil (Paul McCrane), and the often aggressive Raul Garcia (Barry Miller). The film follows their journey from auditioning to be in the school, singing and dancing rehearsals, personal downfalls in their bid to get somewhere, including Coco unintentionally going into pornography, and of course graduation with the whole gang performing on stage. Also starring Eddie Barth as Angelo, Lee Curreri as Bruno, Laura Dean as Lisa Monroe, Antonia Franceschi as Hilary Van Doren, Boyd Gaines as Michael and Gene Anthony Ray as Leroy. I mainly heard about the film first because of the title song "Fame" going to number one in the UK, and then again when Justin Lee Collins tried to get Irena Cera on board for the Bring Back... Fame reunion, which she refused. I will be honest in saying that I wasn't completely interested in the story, more the singing and dancing, but even that didn't stop me thinking this wasn't really my cup of tea, but it certainly wasn't bad. It won the Oscar for Best Music for Michael Gore and Best Song for the title song (it also won the Golden Globe), and it was nominated for Best Film Editing, Best Song for "Out Here on My Own", Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, it won the BAFTA for Best Sound, and it was nominated for the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music and Best Editing, and it was nominated the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Musical/Comedy and Best Original Score. Okay!

This was on TV last night. I painfully forced my way through it, and barely made it through. First of all, except for Leroy, Hilary, and possibly Coco, NONE of the other students we are supposed to care about have any discernible talent. It's like HSPA had no standards, just sign on the dotted line and you're in. The story lines were grating and obvious. Doris was just impossibly awful. The gay guy was such a thrown away cliché (funny how that school had only one gay guy, right...) I liked the Leroy character, but calling your teacher an obscenity and then vandalizing the school should have sent Leroy packing. Lisa looks like she'd rather be anywhere else, and since she wasn't any talent, I wonder why they kept her. I would have rated this one star (awful), but the music wasn't that bad, and I did like the premise. It just would have worked much better if the students had been attractive and actually had some talent.