Mark Graham at Vulture reports that Fox Searchlight has canceled its rollout of Jared Hess's Gentlemen Broncos because of savage reviews. To hell with those reviews. And to hell with Fox Searchlight for losing heart. This is among the wildest and bravest comedies I've seen in years. Sure, some of Hess’s gross-out gags are heavy-handed, and the grotesquery is laid on too thick. But even at its campiest, there's a serious theme. Vastly disparate sexual issues are being worked out through outlandish fantasies — freaky, psychedelic enactments of the hero's novels that are so visionary and intense that they hurtle past Freud into a Jung-like mythical dimension. Gentlemen Broncos is a leap over Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. Now, Hess doesn’t just gaze on paralyzed nerds from the outside; he takes you into their heads and gives form to their alienation from the physical world. It used to be that movies this ambitiously bizarre could find a home in midnight screenings and develop fanatical cults. Now they go straight to DVD — which deprives us of the fun of experiencing them with a responsive audience. See the movie before it goes away. And Fox Searchlight: Reconsider. There must be a way to help this picture find an audience.
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