Salon.com > fanboys

Roger Ebert was the original fanboy

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:50:00 +0000

It's no secret that Roger Ebert was a fan of movies. He loved movies passionately and sometimes despite themselves—like when he gave Speed 2: Cruise Control, a movie with a 2% tomato meter rating, a three star review because of its passionate commitment to "goofiness."

But what most people don't know is that he was also in fandom. Ebert began his career as a teenager in sci-fi fandom, writing passionate letters to fanzines and eventually writing for the fanzines himself.

But he didn't just write. In a missive for sci-fi magazine Asimov's, published in 2004, Ebert recalls how "Fandom was a secret society and I had admission to friends everywhere who spoke the same arcane language."

Dark days for Apple

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:39:00 +0000

Like a distinguished violinist working her way through a familiar Beethoven sonata, Lydia Depillis delivers a thoroughly professional rendition of a classic tune -- Apple fans and their discontents -- in the (new) New Republic. Timed to coincide with Apple's annual meeting on Wednesday, the piece explores a growing sense of unease on the part of Apple's most fervent worshipers. The company, despite its huge profits and genre-defining products, just doesn't seem so insanely great anymore. The thrill is gone.

The malaise stems from multiple sources. Apple hasn't delivered any mind-blowing new products lately. Apple seems to be rolling out bloated, buggy software with greater frequency, making decisions for crass, commercial reasons rather than purity of style, design and function. Apple's stock price has been falling. In one of the nicest touches, Depellis quotes one Apple blogger as comparing "the feeling to a lefty's disillusionment after the election of Barack Obama: 'Well, I still like this guy's platform better than the other guy's platform. But I'm really kind of disappointed with what I see.'"

Is Megan Fox really Hollywood’s ideal mother?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

For a woman who says she's not interested in her career right now, Megan Fox sure is doing everything a woman in Hollywood could do to raise her profile. The 26-year-old actress, in just the four months since the birth of her son, Noah, has managed to leverage motherhood into the pinnacle of celebrity success. And nowhere is that more evident than in her cover story in the new U.K. edition of Marie Claire. In her interview, she trots out all the most beloved of maternal party lines – including the classic I-have-the-very-best-job-in-the-world line. The sultry Ms. Fox, who was also recently the subject of the most slobbering fanboy cover story in the history of Esquire ("The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking … It's closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly") declares that acting "isn’t my job anymore" because "my job is to be with" her baby. Noah.

Geek love: How a fantasy hater fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:00:00 +0000

I’m not generally comfortable with the kind of grown man who embraces the word “geek” as a self-identifier because most of those who do so seem to be making an active attempt to forestall adulthood by barricading its way with sky-high piles of endlessly replicating, increasingly self-referential, post-juvenile pop-culture junk. But when the trailer for "The Hobbit" first appeared nearly a year before the film’s Dec. 14 release (which is just plain goofy — like marketing on geologic time), it prompted what one Facebook poster termed a collective online “nerdgasm” — and I wasn't immune. And so it must be said that those of us who do manage to move comfortably about in the larger world are evidence that a certain Y-chromosome tendency to gibbering fannishness does in fact exist, and many of us have points of contact with this phenomenon that we tend to coddle and then feel guilty about it later.

And some of us wonder why.