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WHAT A SURPRISE!!! This movie taught me that it's definitely best to go into a movie expecting it to suck. Low expectations always get exceeded!

Having said that, I am sure I would've liked it anyway. For one, hottie Sam Worthington was fantastic! Plus it was the perfect mixture of interesting and different + romance + adventure + emotion. I just plain loved it and left with a big smile on my face!!!!

And Zoe Saldana is having quite the year, what with this movie and Star Trek...2 of my favorites of 2009!

One of my friends said Avatar is Dances With Wolves in space. Yeah, I almost choked on that. It's a fantastic movie--different from anything--and a complete experience. It was definitely the shortest 3 hour movie I've ever seen---and I was even sad when it ended!

Plus it's making movie history so you won't want to miss it!

This isn't really a movie review--more like a commercial. There's just too much to explain so you just have to go see it!

Gentlemen Broncos

Thank you Alyssa, for nudging me to get going again. :) And thank you for the following review!!!!

(Alyssa) When my sister told me she had preview tickets for Gentlemen Broncos, I was very excited to see it. I enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite and was very curious about what the same writer and director would do with this movie. Especially when I heard that it would be about sci-fi writers and sci-fi conventions.

The story goes like this: Benjamin Purvis attends a writing conference where he submits his story to a contest. The result—two other conference participants buy rights to his story to make it into a film. And Purvis’s hero, writer Ronald Chevalier, reads Benjamin’s work and creates his own (plagiarized) version of the story, which becomes a fabulous bestseller.

There’s a lot to like about this movie. Michael Angarano and Jemaine Clement turn in excellent performances as Purvis and Chevalier respectively. Chevalier’s dialogue in particular is very funny. As were the scenes revolving around the convention and bookstore appearances. This part of the story was exceptional.

Yet Gentlemen Broncos wasn’t a complete success. The person who has seen Napoleon Dynamite won’t be surprised to hear that there is a quirky cast of characters here as well. However, this group is not exactly endearing. The amateur director who makes Purvis’s work into a movie is particularly grating; the role seems designed to play into stereotypes rather than against them.

There is also a surprising (and unnecessary) reliance on bodily fluid humor, which is both excessive and not humorous. This detracted from a movie that otherwise could have made me laugh the whole way through. So the pattern was something like . . . laugh, laugh, ugh, gross, laugh, ick, laugh, that’s just not even funny. This made the movie seem more jarring than in probably was.

Still, there’s that great bookstore scene . . . and the stags . . . and the ending . . .

Why it wasn’t a four: Jemaine Clement, Michael Angarano, merchandising pillows, and very wide ric-rac. Plus, I would see it again.

Why it wasn’t an eight: Way, way too much vomit (and other stuff).

My rating: six. *Thinks about Clement.* Actually, let’s go for six and a half. *Thinks about the pillows and ric-rac* OK, six and three-quarters.