Sam Huntington plays what may be the lead role in the otherwise ensemble Fanboys, not the friend who has been given four months to live but the guy inheriting the father's business and facing a future he equates with the dark side, not unlike George Walton Lucas Jr who did not want to simply inherit his father's stationery store. Huntington also appeared as the lead in another ensemble road movie Detroit Rock City, where he was under the thumb of a domineering religious mother. That film was released in 1999, a year after Fanboys begins its story.
If you like Detroit Rock City, chances are Fanboys will appeal as well. Instead of KISS, these characters are obsessed with Star Wars in a period where there wasn't as much need to qualify those words. One of the guys happens also to be obsessed with the Canadian rock band RUSH. At first some references come from out of nowhere, but they add a texture – people are going to like what they like. In both movies, Huntington has a scene where he has to strip in a bar. It made more narrative sense in Detroit Rock City, but at least he's not alone in the humiliation and one of his friends takes the brunt of it.
I didn't have to be a hardcore fan of KISS to enjoy Detroit Rock City and likely people don't have to be fans of RUSH or Star Wars to enjoy Fanboys but it will help. I enjoyed where the RUSH music ends up being used and it helps put the viewer in the nostalgic mindset of, well, teens of the early and mid nineteen-eighties – exactly the range of time (1982-1984) that four of the five guys were born; Kristen Bell was born in 1980, so she's an Empire Strikes Back baby. Dan Fogler was born in 1976, a year before Star Wars itself, but because he is heavy some in the audience may accept him as a childhood and high school friend of the others. His sensibilities are those of the director and at least one of the writers, all born in 1976, or perhaps closer to people like myself who were fans in their early thirties when the notorious 1999 Star Wars prequel hit us. The characters do seem to show up at a party with teenagers, and yet most own business. Ultimately they aren't meant to be flesh and blood. One happens to look like young George Lucas we've seen in file photos or from the funny short "George Lucas In Love," and Kristen Bell seems to have died her hair dark for one reason only: to look more Leia-like in a later scene. Seth Rogan plays three roles, which helps reinforce the unreality along with cameos by Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mews and Kevin Smith) along with Smith's documentary guy Zack who was known to like donkeys in Clerks II. Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher also pop up in amusing cameos that allow us to assume the interior of Skywalker Ranch in act II of the story may not have to look and work as it does or did in reality. (Much of Lucasfilm's operation has been moved to The Presidio property now.) For all the amusement and invention, and the heartfelt stakes at the heart of it with a friend's dying wish, the movie is a little short sighted in the sense that these young men – characters in their late twenties or early thirties – often talk in outbursts more suitable for thirteen-year olds. There is an over-the-top hatred between Star Wars and Star Trek fans, when in reality whether we like one brand more than the other there is more audience crossover than polarity. For a comic book store owner to throw out a member of the competing fan base and call him a "Kirk-loving Spock sucker" will play as off-putting and mean even if it is a satirical exaggeration meant to expose the absurdity of the Trek versus Wars rivalry. Unlike Ebert, I'm not bothered that the kid with cancer can participate in a fight, since no extraordinary skill is displayed, any more than the idea that he is walking around and simply taking his pills. It upholds the idea that genre trivia knowledge has an inverse relationship to carnal knowledge. The characters can be at once cool and pathetic, or offensively immature and brilliant which are combinations many people like to pretend do not exist in reality. Overly sensitive audiences won't like this movie. There are bumps along the way but I like where it is going, and it has a very appropriate ending line.
Despite the very limited release of this movie and relatively little hype for the film itself as opposed to the internet controversy, Fanboys lives up to the anticipation a lot of us may have built up, unlike Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. When movies about 9/11 come out, many people coo "too soon." Maybe ten years after we met Jar Jar Binks we can finally laugh at the summer of 1999. Or maybe the solution ended up being this temporal displacement of a story that is really about being stuck in the late 70's and early eighties whether we had been born then or not, listening to RUSH and worrying only that Yoda sounds a bit like Sesame Street's Grover. Not an entirely unpleasant fog.
