Add "anous" to just about anything and it becomes magical.
trashcanman | Hanford, CA United States | 08/11/2010
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Gentlemen Broncos is the latest oddball comedy from Jared Hess, director of Napolean Dynamite. It's a film for anybody who's ever loved a bad sci-fi story or aspired to write one of their own. Allow me to rephrase that: this is not a film for everyone. One must possess an affection for the cheesiest of low-budget science fiction and fantasy for the comedy in this film to work it's insane magic. But that magic is pretty damn magical when it does work.
This is the simple story of a boy with a dream and the subsequent raping of that dream by idiot film producers and an unscrupulous author. This is a story that will not be unfamiliar to film fans and it does a great job spoofing the eternal conflict between writer and filmmaker as well as the cutthroat nature of the entertainment industry. Everybody should know by now that anything you write and you don't want stolen needs to be registered and/or copyrighted before showing it anywhere. What makes this particular standard song-and-dance anything but is the sheer insanity and whimsy of the material in the film, which contains several scenes from different interpretations of varying quality of the contested book "Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years" Is it the surveillance does and the battle stags that give the story in question it's charm? Maybe. Moments like pained hero angrily shouting "You took my nads!"? A little. Poop-coated blow darts? Why not. Black Sabbath-fueled cross-dressing rampage? If that's your thing. Illustrations featuring space Harpies' mammary cannons? I'd like to think so. All of the quotable quotes that are too bizarre for me to recall at the moment? Probably. Puke and testicle jokes? Depends. The point is, if you have a taste for the unusual and an appreciation of cheesy genre books and films then you will probably get a kick out of this one. If you go in expecting Napolean Dynamite 2 or anything approaching standard Hollywood fare, don't go in at all. This is for the kids who grew up on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and movies about giant fire-breathing turtles and ant queens who control humans with pheromones. The rest of y'all can take a hike.
The cast of characters is the usual troupe of rejects whose faces are frozen in bizarre expressions, talk in an awkward and apparently brain-damaged manner, and have strange senses of style. After the novelty of Napolean Dynamite and Jack Black's rescuing of Hess' other film, Nacho Libre, this motif has worn a bit thin and feels contrived at this point. However, as Black made Nacho work, Broncos has a savior as well. Jemaine Clement of HBO's hysterical musical comedy series Flight of the Conchords gives an absolutely flawless performance as a pretentious and self-important sci-fi novelist whose appearances at conventions (his workshop on believable fantasy character names is indispensable) and signings are responsible for most of the knowing guffaws that any fan of the art form is likely to experience while viewing this. That man is damn funny and would have earned this flick a pass all by himself.
"Gentlemen Broncanous" (ooh, that DOES have a nice ring to it!!) is the This is Spinal Tap of low-rent sci-fi. It's both an homage/tribute and a satirical parody of the genre. Not everybody is going to appreciate it, but the ones who do will appreciate it a lot. You know who you are. Check it out."
The most well guarded yeast factory I've ever seen!
Phillip Malphrus Jr. | Woodruff, SC United States | 08/02/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Give this a chance. It is so funny, better than Napoleon Dynamite. I don't think I have ever laughed so hard at a movie and I'm old, almost 36! :)"
Insanely Badainous (sic)
B. M Sullivan | New York, NY United States | 07/21/2010
(1 out of 5 stars)
"The Chevalier character was great. Original, well acted, funny, etc. Everything else about this movie just didn't work. I really wanted to like this movie, but it relied far too heavily on the awkwardness of it's characters and crude testicle, poop, etc references to elicit a laugh or two from the audience.
There's not a whole lot to say about this one. Any attempt at originality is so poorly executed that it renders this film unwatchable."