CrawlerChunky
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
ThedevilChoose
When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.
Roy Hart
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
bjw414
i'm absolutely not a fan of 21st century culture. but 1 of the few movies that i like is "napoleon dynamite". this movie is from the same director. so i thought that it was going to be funny. it isn't. it is over-saturated with sarcasm. i like sarcasm. but this movie is >95% sarcasm. and, it got annoying within 10 minutes. if i didn't know that movie was written by Jared and Jerusha Hess, i would guess that it was written by mean-spirited middle school children. when i was growing up, i liked the novel "dune" by frank Hebert. i liked the movie, too. "yeast lords" is obviously making fun of "dune". Jared and jerusha Hess will never come close to making anything as good as "dune". and they know it. so, they just a made cheap, mean-spirited movie such as this.
zardoz-13
Jared Hess and wife/producer Jerusha are truly mad geniuses! Hess's third movie after "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Nacho Libre," Gentlemen Broncos" qualifies as insanely hilarious. The challenge of dramatizing the subject of plagiarism would be considerable for anybody, but the Hess's have done an imaginative job of adapting it as an absurdist comedy of errors between two goofy sci-fi writers. Indeed, this trim 90-minute epic possesses an obvious high camp quality in its outlandish depiction of science fiction. Believe me, the narrative in the crazy sci-fi scenes is abysmal, so horribly bad that is emerges as funny. A popular sci-fi author of significant renown, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement of "HBO's Flight of the Conchords"), has lost his touch. Chevalier's publisher threatens to stop publishing him. At the Cletus Writers Camp, Chevalier plagiarizes a high school student's infantile but original manuscript that he got at a writers camp where he served as the chief spokesman. "Gentlemen Broncos" alternates the scenes of the conniving Chevalier touting his art and our high school protagonist, Benjamin (Michael Angarano of "Empire State"), with their versions of "Yeast Wars." These scenes are entertaining nonsense that resembles something out of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." The scene when Chevalier tries to bribe Benjamin at a book signing convention is memorable. When Hess isn't pitting Chevalier against Benjamin, he treats us to sensitive scenes of Benjamin and his deluded mother, Judith (Jennifer Coolidge of "American Pie"), who has dreams of selling a line of women's night garments. A subplot involving a possible romance interest for Benjamin and a wacky filmmaker, perhaps not unlike Hess, is amusing, too. Beware of the lowest-common denominator bowel humor especially projectile vomiting. "Gentleman Broncos" is not for everybody.
Roland E. Zwick
"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.
bdgill12
Home schooled would-be fantasy writer Benjamin (Michael Angarano) goes to a writer's convention where he meets his hero, Chevalier (Jermaine Clement). After entering Chevalier's writing contest, Benjamin is stunned to discover that Chevalier has stolen his ideas and published a new book without crediting the young writer. Meanwhile, Benjamin has already sold the rights to his book to a local filmmaker who butchers his work, leaving him a bit frustrated and volatile.A few years ago, director Jared Hess caught lightning in a bottle with the cost-nothing-to-make blockbuster "Napoleon Dynamite." "Napoleon" was a weird piece of ridiculousness that you either loved or hated and I happened to love. To this day if I'm flipping channels and come across the "Canned Heat" dance scene, I stop down to watch it no matter what. Since then, however, Hess has been chasing that success like an Indian casino poker player dumping his paycheck into the flop (not the best analogy I've ever put together, I admit). "Nacho Libre" drew in a big name (Jack Black) and made a little money but flopped critically. "Broncos" takes flopping to a whole new level. With a production budget of around $10 million, this stinker has brought in approximately $200,000 total. It's really hard these days for a movie to not at least break even when it's all said and done, but "Broncos" has made that feat look easy.This movie has absolutely no flow and very, very few laughs. The script is thin and the story just not worth telling, at least the way it's told here. The whole thing is just uninspired and that immature quirkiness that made "Napoleon" work so well is completely absent here, replaced only with cringe-inducing moments of utter stupidity. In all seriousness, the epic failure of "Broncos" may very well make it the last mainstream movie Hess ever directs, which is sad considering where he started.Check out my site: www.thesoapboxoffice.blogspot.com/
