It's one thing when a movie tells you to go for your dream. The staggeringly contrived Flemish fairy tale Everybody's Famous! says that to be a star, all you need is to believe in your talent -- even if you don't have any. At amateur variety contests, Marva (Eva van der Gucht), a miserable fat teenager, warbles her way through tone-deaf renditions of ''Material Girl.'' But her father (Josse de Pauw), a scalawag prole who wears some of the ugliest shirts ever seen on a movie screen, knows that she's got greatness in her. In a scheme that trashes credibility far more than it does morality, he kidnaps the country's reigning pop diva and arranges for Marva to record a song he ''wrote.''
A movie that aspires to be Muriel's Wedding and can't muster the proper wacky fraudulence to achieve that goal is a sad spectacle indeed. Sheer awfulness aside, a question lingers: Why would a company like Miramax even release a film in which a talent-show contestant performs an Otis Redding impersonation -- in blackface?
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