Gentlemen Broncos

Three other films spring to mind that Broncos reminds me of in the sense that they all bring similar elements; absurdist story structure, over-the-top character-acting, and an unapologetic bevy of immature, toilet-ish, sometimes abstract humor.

What I can't think of is two people other than me that actually enjoy this kind of film a lot. And I'm guessing you can't either. That's why I think these kinds of films do badly. It breaks down like this;

• 10%; people who even knew this was coming out - 5%; of those people saw it - 2.5%; of those people liked it - 90% of everybody else doesn't care - 100% of those people who didn't care would probably hate this worse than could possibly be imagined.

If you disagree and love this film, see box office receipts for, and then watch; Land of the Lost, Freddy Got Fingered, and UHF. Not only are they three excellent movies in a similar vein, but they all bombed beyond oblivion for the same reason.

I get that it might not be everyone's cup of tea but my wife and I found it laugh out loud funny!

So, I completely understand why people do not like this movie. It can be gross, confusing, and just plain stupid at times. With that said, it is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Jemaine Clement and Sam Rockwell fell into the roles of some of the funniest characters I have ever seen. There are some lines when both in and out of context made me laugh so hard I cried.

This movie is not for everyone, I think people who like both napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre will find some enjoyment out of this(which I don't). More importantly, I think people looking for some sci-fi fantasy literature satire will get a kick out of this, because both the dialog with the "Authors" and all the excerpts from the two books had my laughing out loud constantly.

I watched this with my 10 and 6 year old boys and we laughed the whole time. It's a ridiculous movie, with crazy, interesting and incredibly funny characters. Jennifer Coolidge is brilliant, as usual. Benjamin, the main character, is believable as a thoughtful, possibly gifted outsider amongst crazies. There are lots of fun shifts between the main plot line and Benjamin's created one, the story that was stolen. His story is shown via perfectly bad sci-fi movie scenes, complete with dialogue believably written by a teenage boy. We loved it - happened upon it and were glad we did. I saw a negative review for the movie and will say I thought it was MUCH funnier and better than Napolean Dynamite.

"Gentlemen Broncos" is so off-the-charts weird at times that you often can't tell whether it's breaking new ground as a brilliantly original and creative work - or just trying too hard.

Michael Angarano ("Forbidden Kingdom") plays Benjamin Pervis, a friendless teen who lives with his penniless mom in a geodesic-domed house in rural Utah. Ben is a writer of sci-fi fantasy fiction who has one of his stories stolen by Ronald Chevalier (the delightful Jemaine Clement), a world-famous author with a James Mason voice. Ben also runs into a couple of bizarre indie-film makers who want to make the same story Chevalier stole from him (entitled "Yeast Lords" from the series "Gentlemen Broncos") into one of their shoestring-budget productions.

It's hard to know whether writers Jared and Jerusha Hess (Jared also directed the film) have any real affection for their characters and the world they inhabit or whether they view them merely as objects of out-and-out mockery and ridicule. In fact, the characters, with their mouth-breathing, slack-jawed expressions and atonal line readings, achieve near-freak show status at times. It's this air of condescension, rather than the tale itself, that sometimes makes it hard for us to laugh at what's happening on screen.

Despite this discomfort, however, there is still much to admire in the work. The movie has fun parodying both the unscrupulous nature of the publishing business and the accoutrements of low-budget filmmaking. Clement is marvelously deadpan as the sci-fi penner whose writer's-block forces him to scrap all traces of authorial integrity in pursuit of the almighty buck. And Angarano creates in Benjamin a character we can actually care about and root for. The enactments of scenes from Benjamin's novels are appropriately hokey and cheesy, and the movie also makes astute musical choices, particularly Zager and Evans' 1969 hit "In the Year 2525," which effectively book-ends the story.