Fanboys

Four childhood friends and Star Wars fans decide to go cross-country to steal a copy of 'Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace' before its release from George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. Eric (Sam Huntington) is on the cusp of real responsibility with the family car dealership. Windows (Jay Baruchel) has an online fling with a girl who says she has plans to Skywalker Ranch. Linus (Chris Marquette) is really sick and Hutch (Dan Fogler) is the loud-mouth idiot. Zoe (Kristen Bell) is Windows' co-worker at the video store. Seth Rogen plays Admiral Seasholtz, leader of the Trekies, and pimp Roach.

This is definitely best for sci-fi fans. There is a lot of references to Star Wars, Star Trek, and quite frankly various other franchises. The movie just won't work if you don't know any of the references. Of course, there are all sorts of cameos from those series. Not all of the road trip works well. The roadside biker bar isn't that funny. The fight with the Trekkies is much better. When Zoe rejoins the group at the midpoint, she has a lot of fun with the geeks. Probably she should have been the fifth road tripper right from the start. While the constant referencing is funny, sometimes it needs a break to work more on the relationships.

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.

There are is lot of mixed review floating around this movie, a much of which is calling for a lower rating than what is now around a 7. Most all of them agree though, that this movie provides some laughs, has decent acting, and is decently done. From what I can tell, all those factors add up to an above average movie, which should earn it a seven. Now, it is no masterpiece, and it may not be groundbreaking in any way, but it is an all around solid film. Really, what could have been done to this movie to make it much better? A few things here and there could have been changed, but nothing major. The movie is called Fanboys, about a group of overly zealous Star Wars fans, everyone harshing on the dialogue should realize that a movie about Fanboys would do well to use a script emulating Fanboy lingo and cheesy jokes. Some people say that this movie survives on the cameos. If that is the case, then they must be some good cameos, and maybe that's all they are, just well used cameos, and not a crutch for the movie like some people claim. Give Fanboys a shot and make your own opinions, plus, this movie didn't hit theatres, so don't compare it to films that are out of it's league. Even though I find this much better than some of the garbage gracing the silver screen today.

"Fanboys" is a movie about, well, fanboys. Four childhood friends make a pact on Halloween night in 1998 to infiltrate the Skywalker Ranch in hopes of catching a rough cut of the long-awaited "Star Wars" prequel, "The Phantom Menace." Together in a geeked-out van, armed with dozens of Rush cassette tapes, they make a cross-country trip where they battle with angry Trekkies ("Star Trek" fans, for the uninitiated), stumble into an "all-male" bar, evade an angry pimp and land in jail, while one of their own attempts to make peace with his fate.

The film was pushed back for so long and re-edited so much (re-shoots were done by hack director Steven Brill, which thankfully were dumped from the final product, as directed by Kyle Newman) that it's easy to let the problems that plagued "Fanboys" overshadow the movie. What the movie delivers, though, is an often hilarious, sometimes sentimental and utterly geeky send-up of geek culture. A valentine to "Star Wars" fans, perhaps, it's a film that pokes fun at its core audience without alienating it. There's a wealth of cameos , too, from the likes of William Shatner, Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and three (count 'em, three) roles featuring Seth Rogen. If one thing can be said about the film, it's never a bore.

Sure, the road-trip formula has been used many times before, and yes, the film rarely breaks from the expected, but its subplot revolving around a sick friend keeps it from being just some raunchy teen comedy with a geeky twist. "Fanboys" has heart, and combined with a solid young cast and hundreds of "Star Wars" and other nerdy references, makes it a film worth returning to again and again.

Although this product is far from inventive, or full of carefully orchestrated comedy. It is by no matter of means, slow and boring. If anything, it makes the time fly.

The humour is rather stupid and vulgar, but if you're even close to being a sci-fi geek yourself, or able to appreciate how hilarious this kind of archetype can be. You won't be disappointed.

However, there is a failed attempt at adding heartfelt drama to this movie, no doubt trying to inspire people to follow their dreams and remind them that the time for doing so, is limited. Which isn't a bad thing to do, obviously. It just seemed a little bit out of place. On that note; I have no clue as to why drama and crime are added to this film's genre, you might as well add romance and sci-fi.

Disconnect your brain and laugh your aches away!