Gentlemen Broncos

2009 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Young Benjamin's worked hard on Yeast Lords,
a sci-fi novel with a hero partially inspired by a father who is no longer around. His mother sends him to a writer's camp where he meets his author/hero Ronald Chevalier and a boob-obsessed teen filmmaker who has made over eighty movies although some of those are just trailers. Benjamin throws his Yeast Lords into a pile for a contest and is rewarded for his hard work by having Chevalier, currently struggling with his own ideas, steal his work and have it published. Around the same time, the filmmaker gives him five hundred dollars for the right to adapt Yeast Lords into a feature film. Problems occur when Chevalier finds out because there's nothing he hates worse than plagiarism.

On the poster, they advertise this as being from the director (Jared Hess) of Napoleon Dynamite. A lot of times, that sort of thing can be misleading. Not here. It's entirely appropriate, either as a threat for those who think Napoleon Dynamite is the stupidest thing they've ever seen, or as a promise to anybody who happens to like that movie. I personally liked Napoleon Dynamite, so I suppose I'm the audience for this sort of thing even though I can see how large chunks of Gentlemen Broncos might even be too wacky for Napoleon's fans. Hess is the type of director who knows how strange people really are and uses his films to magnify eccentricities into wildly comic proportions. Nothing about these characters or the worlds they inhabit are exactly realistic. Our protagonist, played by Michael Angarano, acts as a kind of straight man here, but in every other movie, he'd easily be the weirdo. Jermaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords and Eagle vs. Shark) and Jennifer Coolidge (lots of stupid movies) really steal the show, and they get so many hilarious lines to say. Honestly, I'm not sure how they can say some of the things they say without erupting into a painful fit of giggles, but I guess that's why they make all the money. I'm also not sure how Hector Jimenez can contort his face into such goofy expressions, but I almost laughed every time he was on the screen. A scene involving a hand massage and Jimenez's horrifying moaning was probably the goofiest thing I've seen all year. There are some really dopey soundtrack choices, kind of like Hess swung for Wes Anderson's fences and missed, but there's some great set design and art work. A lot of the set details in the places these characters frequent seems to have been picked up at rummage sales (butterfly decor, Jesus portraits), but there are some originals that the characters painted that are pretty sweet. The science fiction covers used during the opening credits, whether they're real or originals, are also cool. A lot of the stuff going on in the movies-within-the-movie was a bit much and there were far too many boob and gonad references. Then again, gonad humor almost always works. Heh. Gonads.

I looked up Napoleon Dynamite to link this to that and was surprised to see that I apparently haven't watched that movie in the last three years. Odd since it seems like I've watched Napoleon Dynamite over a hundred times.