cinemadaily | “Gentlemen Broncos” Bucks US Audiences

Slant‘s Andrew Schenker says of the film’s scriptwriters, “whereas that great creator of quirky supporting characters, Charles Dickens, wisely stuck each of his comic grotesques with a single distinctive gesture or phrase, Hess’s figures are so overloaded with bad ideas it’s difficult to tell what the joke is supposed to be. The only thing that’s clear is that it’s not very funny.”  In a particularly meandering rant in his short review in the Village Voice, Scott Foundas says, “But both ‘Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years’ and the life of its author are subject to so much projectile vomit, animal flatulence, and innumerable plays on the word ‘anus’ that even first-graders may find their tolerance tested. ‘You took my nads!’ and ‘Eat the corn out of my crap’ vie for their place in the catchphrase canon, and an animatronic deer fires missiles out of its ass, though it’s ‘Flight of the Conchords’’ Jemaine Clement who handily steals the show as a bestselling fanboy scribe sky-high on his own pomposity. Hess deserves credit, I suppose, for so effectively channeling his inner seven-year-old.”

In New York Magazine, David Edelstein calls the film an “enchantingly freakish comedy” and says of Clement’s performance, “Even if you love him on ‘Flight of the Conchords,’ you’ll be unprepared for his genius—and charisma.”  Edelstein muses, “There’s enough weird breast imagery in this movie to make Robert Crumb murmur, ‘This guy’s got issues’...There’s a bit when bodice-ripper writer Tabitha (Halley Feiffer, a whiz with deadpan) squirts lotion all over her hand and asks an aghast Benjamin to rub it in, as her rictus-faced friend Lonnie leans into her ear issuing moose calls and crunching potato chips; David Lynch would murmur, ‘This guy’s got issues.”  In the New York Press, Armond White also defends the film, even defining Hess as the leader of a new breed of filmmakers, “Among the American Eccentric directors—those filmmakers who came of age in the Star Wars generation—Jared Hess is the most offbeat….This is personal filmmaking, surveying the private emotions that generally embarrass people or make us feel out of step—a daring proposition in an era that frantically insists upon marketable conformity. Hess works out scenarios that reveal naked idiosyncrasy…This mix of hokum and sincerity is unusual, yet genuine…It’s all part of our authentic and poignant cultural mess.”